Four Oregon projects that incorporated public art have received from Americans for the Arts.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, an advocate for the arts and arts education, compiled a list of 31 outstanding public art projects constructed in 2014. Three were for the city of Portland: Fire Station 21, a nature playground at Westmoreland Park and improvements to Southeast Division Street. A memorial at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem also was recognized.

The projects are included in the Public Art Network Year in Review database, which annually recognizes compelling public art in the U.S. and Canada.

This year’s jury-selected projects were announced last week during an Americans for the Arts’ convention in Chicago. The 2015 Public Arts Network Year in Review jury included an Oregon official – Peggy Kendellen, public art manager for Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council.

Pacific Northwest artist David Franklin was honored for an installation that invokes water ripples on the west façade of Fire Station 21 in Southeast Portland. The building was designed by Whelton Architecture in collaboration with architect David P. Suttle and constructed by Skanska USA Building.

A Portland Bureau of Transportation streetscape improvement project was recognized for including eight sculptures of people by Portland artists Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis. They were installed along Division Street between 11th and 36th avenues.

Americans for the Arts recognized the Portland Parks & Recreation effort to replace the Westmoreland Park playground with a nature play area designed by Portland-based landscape architecture firm GreenWorks in collaboration with artist Adam Kuby.

Seattle-based art and architecture firm Lead Pencil Studio was honored for designing a memorial that holds the 3,456 cremated remains of patients who died at the Oregon State Hospital and were never claimed by family members.

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Skanska USA Building is on target for a November completion of Fire Station 21, a new 2-story fire and life safety facility being built on the eastern bank of the Willamette River. Construction crews are installing siding and roofing on the building’s exterior, while plumbers and drywall crews are busy inside. The $7.8 million project was designed by Whelton Architecture in collaboration with architect David P. Suttle.

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A new Fire Station 21 is being built in Portland to withstand a major earthquake, and serve as a fire and life safety facility along the Willamette River. Construction of such a building on a sloped surface extending over the river comes with challenges, said David Dwyer, project manager for Skanska USA Building – the contractor for the $7.8 million project.

The two-story structure will replace a one-story one on virtually the same footprint, Dwyer said.

“It’s not actually native soil because that area is all fill,” he said. “We’ve had to stabilize all the soil.”

Soil stabilization took about six months, starting in October after the former fire station was demolished, Dwyer said. Deep steel pilings were drilled 80 to 100 feet into bedrock, and soil was filled with grout.

“That’s why all the foundation work has taken so long,” he said. “It’s a challenging way to build. We had to get down there deep enough so that the soil was compacted so it doesn’t liquefy in an earthquake.”

The grout had to be pumped at a well-regulated pressure to accommodate different soils beneath the surface, Dwyer said.

On top of all the subsurface work, Skanska is finishing the concrete footing that will support the steel structure. At least half of the 8,000-square-foot building will be supported by 3-foot-wide, 30-foot-long beams that cantilever over the bank, Dwyer said.

The first floor will be built a couple of feet above the 100-year flood zone level; anything lower will be certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as water-resistant, he said.

“The next challenge is building the building at a slope,” Dwyer said. “Obviously, we can’t drop materials or build a scaffolding system west of the work area.”

Crews are designing a work platform that will be cantilevered from underneath the building, allowing them to build while preventing spills, he said.

Building the station required local, state and federal approvals, which were granted faster because the dock had been approved for fire station use in 2001, said Connie Johnson, project manager for the city’s Bureau of Internal Business Services.

“One thing that’s compelling is that this location is so good,” she said. “If we had tried to find another location on the river, it would have taken a year to acquire the property and at least another six months to get all the permitting. It was really a good choice.”

A boathouse already constructed by Oregon Iron Works will house two boats. A third will be added later, Johnson said.

The building is designed to accommodate fire and life safety activities in a confined space, said Aaron Whelton, principal of Whelton Architecture; he collaborated with local architect David P. Suttle on the project.

Site factors included seismic issues, river fluctuations, proximity to Interstate 5 and the Hawthorne Bridge, and the city’s desire to keep the greenway pristine and free of additional buildings, Whelton said.

“It’s a huge responsibility,” he said. “There isn’t going to be a building like this in such a prominent location on the river anywhere.”

Efforts were made to reduce the amount of the building’s footprint on the ground; at least 50 percent of the building will be cantilevered over the bank, Whelton said. The apparatus bay, which will hold an all-terrain vehicle and a small fire engine, will be the only portion of the building that completely touches the ground, he said.

The design also creates a living space in a building that will be visible from six different vantage points, including the Hawthorne Bridge and the river, Whelton said.

“Typically, a fire station has a clear front and back,” he said. “We don’t have that kind of luxury. Every portion is visible from some vantage point.”

Bunk rooms will be as far away from I-5 as possible to reduce noise. An exterior deck will be tucked away so firefighters are not always on display. Four firefighters will live at the station, which will have five rooms, according to the city.

A utility courtyard was developed for the building’s air conditioning equipment, which typically would be placed on the roof, Whelton said. The courtyard, which will house the HVAC equipment, the building’s transformer and trash, will be completed tucked away, he said.

“We did a very good job solving those unique challenges,” he said.

The most prominent feature will be artwork called “The Ripple Wall,” by Seattle artist David Franklin. It will be fabricated in Seattle and assembled in Portland, and include a series of vertical aluminum fins on the west side covering a second-floor catwalk around the building. Each fin will have a different profile, creating a unique rippling effect visible from the bridge and the river, Whelton said.

“I think that’s an amazing opportunity to engage the public with art,” he said.

The public also will be able to engage with the space in a community room, which will have views of the river and be open for the public to reserve, he said.

Project construction is scheduled to wrap up in November.

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If a massive earthquake were to strike the Portland area, fire control would be critical.

“We’re really concerned about the (predicted) subduction zone earthquake and our water supply,” said Glen Eisner, logistics chief for Portland Fire & Rescue. “If the water mains break, we’re still responsible to get water to the fire.”

In that situation firefighters would turn to the David Campbell fireboat, which has cannons capable of shooting 15,000 gallons of river water a minute. It’s an essential tool for big cities; Eisner said similar boats were used in response to 9/11 in New York City.

But if the power were lost or if the Hawthorne Bridge lift mechanism were to malfunction, the fireboat wouldn’t make it past the bridge. That’s just one of the reasons why the city of Portland is preparing to rebuild Fire Station 21.

The existing facility, at 5 S.E. Madison St., sits just north of the Hawthorne Bridge on the east side of the Willamette River. In addition to a new boathouse north of the bridge, the $5.1 million project calls for demolition of a 5,000-square-foot, seismically unsound building and construction of a 7,500-square-foot replacement.

Big challenges include unstable soil conditions and a tight project schedule – all in-water work needs to be completed in October.

The project team is reviewing proposals for construction manager-general contractor services, and Eisner said the city planned to have a firm on board by early September. Submissions were issued by , in partnership with ; , in partnership with ; and Howard S. Wright.

The project was delayed previously because of controversy about the request for proposals process used to hire the architect. The contract eventually went to , which is working in collaboration with David P. Suttle.

After contracts, submittals and materials are in place, the next big challenge will be to drive 11 structural piles into unstable soil. Eisner said that in the event of an earthquake the soils likely would liquefy because they are composed mostly of fill materials.

“If you start digging down you come across all types of debris, and building debris and trees and stuff used to fill that space in,” he said.

Connie Johnson, construction project manager for the Bureau of Internal Business Services and Facilities in the Office of Management and Finance, said a process called compaction grouting would be used to stabilize the soil. Small-diameter shafts are advanced through the soil and a mortar-like grout is injected at high pressures as the shaft is removed, creating bulbous columns. The columns displace and compact the dirt around them.

Another challenge will be to maintain water rescue services while construction is taking place. Eisner said a temporary modular unit will be installed to house the fire crews. He said a permanent presence is needed at the site for river rescues.

“They don’t often make the news, but they’re more frequent than people think,” Eisner said. “Every few months someone gets saved out of that river in that location.”

The most recent one occurred a few weeks ago. It’s Johnson’s job to make sure construction does not hamper those efforts.

“My job is to worry about everything and never feel comfortable,” she said. “So, yeah, I’m excited. It’s going to be a wonderful amenity – I didn’t realize the need for water rescue I think until I started working on this project.”

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A five-month search by the city of Portland for a firm to design Fire Station 21 appears to be over. The city last week said it intends to negotiate a contract with Whelton Architecture to handle architecture and engineering for the project.

This is the second contract award for Whelton to design Fire Station 21. The city’s procurement services department in the Office of Management and Finance admits that the facilities department, which managed the first award, made some mistakes. The procurement services department says it addressed the errors by restarting the evaluation process. However, a competing firm’s owner, who brought to light the problems with the first award, says he still is concerned.

Fire Station 21 consulting team

Whelton Architecture will negotiate a contract for the design of Fire Station 21. Its proposed contract amount for the project was $607,075. The architecture team will be Aaron Whelton of Whelton Architecture, and architect David Suttle. The consulting team includes:
• TCA Architecture & Planning, consulting architecture
• KPFF, structural and civil engineering
• Interface Engineering: mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering, and lighting design
• Flowing Solutions, waterfront planning and permitting
• Green Building Services, LEED project management, energy modeling and building analysis, and commissioning
• 2.ink Studio, landscape architecture
• JMB Consulting Group, cost estimation
• Evergreen Engineering, code analysis

“It wasn’t a transparent process,” Carleton Hart Architecture‘s William Hart said.

In April, 10 architecture firms submitted proposals to design a new fire station to replace an aging building near the Hawthorne Bridge. The existing station is the last in Portland not seismically upgraded – when a bond was passed to upgrade all city stations, Fire Station 21 was out of commission. It was brought online recently to replace a station in a different location that will be taken out of commission because of nearby Portland-Milwaukie light-rail construction nearby.

The Office of Management and Finance’s facilities department, which managed the request for proposals process, decided that of the 10 firms that applied, those with the four highest scores would qualify for oral interviews. The winner would then be selected based on the results of the oral interviews.

In a protest letter to the city, Hart wrote that the facilities department did not follow that outlined RFP process. The overall scores used to calculate the winning firm consisted of scores from the evaluation of written proposals and from the oral interviews. But not all firms were asked the same questions, according to Hart, which caused led some firms to score higher than others.

Hart pointed out that a representative of the city’s facilities department told firms during a mandatory pre-application conference that short-listed firms would “start from zero” during the interview process. According to Hart’s calculations, if the city had indeed “started from zero” and excluded the issues not discussed in their oral interviews, Carleton Hart would have won the contract.

Procurement Supervisor Barb Gibson called the problem a “process issue.”

“The Chief Procurement Officer agreed … that Carleton Hart had a point that there was a ‘process problem,’ ” Gibson said.

So the city rescinded Whelton’s award from the original RFP round, and the process was moved from the facilities department to the procurement services department. In a June 15 interview with the Daily Journal of Commerce, OMF management analyst Abby Coppick said that the city would re-interview the shortlisted firms.

On July 17, Gibson told the 91��Ƶ that the city would return to evaluations of the original 10 written proposals and convene an entirely new evaluation committee. It was the first time in memory that the clock had been turned back so far on the process, Gibson said in that interview.

“As we started working, it became clear that we needed to back it up one more step,” Gibson said. “We really wanted it to be a clean process.”

The new committee evaluated the 10 written proposals, and Whelton Architecture came out on top. On Aug. 12, the city once again issued a notice that Whelton Architecture would get the contract.

Aaron Whelton, owner of the winning architecture firm, said he believes procurement services took the right action. “I think it was the right decision to take a step back,” Whelton said. “By going back in the process, it strengthens the decision and removes it from potential scrutiny.”

But Hart doesn’t believe the time for scrutiny has passed. He said his main question at this point is why the city didn’t call firms back in for oral interviews for the second process.

“The interviews were important the first time around; I don’t see why they were excluded this time,” Hart said. “Usually things are more transparent. Given as much scrutiny that this (process) has had, it would seem that (the city) would have at least had oral interviews.”

Gibson said her office had the option of conducting oral interviews in the second process, but decided that doing so was unlikely to change the outcome because of the disparity in points between the top two firms.

In the first round, the top two candidates were separated by a distance of 10 points out of 500; in the second round, the distance was 13 points out of 600. Both of those represent a margin of about 2 percent.

“A lot of times, we use the orals when there’s just one or two points between. But when there’s a larger gap it’s not normal that we go to (interviews),” Gibson said.

Hart did not submit a protest letter after Whelton was awarded the contract in the second round. Even if the process had gone to oral interviews in the second round, his firm would not have made the cut. In the second round, Whelton Architecture was a front-runner with 502 points, and Carleton Hart had the second lowest score at 428. The firms received the same score when their written proposals were scored in the first round – and both were in third place.

The five-member committee for the first process and the six-member committee for the second process both included representatives from the city fire bureau and from the committee that oversees the bond that will pay for construction. Community members, one city staffer and one Multnomah County staffer also participated.

The scores were created by the evaluation committees assigning numerical values to subjective areas, like “project approach and understanding” and “proposer’s capabilities.”

Portland Fire & Rescue’s new Deputy Chief of Logistics Marco Benetti was a member of the committee for the second process. He said it was “pretty straightforward.”

“Everyone has their own subjectivity about how their scores are,” Benetti said. “But (the scores) all seemed to come out pretty close among all the scoring people.

“I’m looking forward to the project going forward,” he added.

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The city of Portland’s procurement services has issued an intent to award notice for a contract for the design of Fire Station 21 to Whelton Architecture — for the second time.

Whelton Architecture’s Aaron Whelton won the contract initially in May, but that award was revoked after Carleton Hart Architecture filed a protest. Abby Coppock, management analyst for the city’s Office of Management and Finance, said in June that the city had not correctly followed the procurement process for the project.

William Hart, who filed the protest letter for Carleton Hart, wrote in that letter that he believed his firm would have been awarded the contract if the process had been followed correctly.

The city initially said it would turn back the clock to the interview phase and correct the process from that point by re-interviewing the shortlisted firms, but it later decided to turn the clock back even further to convene a new evaluation committee to look at all 10 initially submitted proposals.

The city issued the new intent to award — this time a “notice of intent to negotiate and award contract” to Whelton on Friday after 5 p.m.

Protests of the current award must be filed by this Friday, Aug. 19. Whelton has declined to comment until the protest period is over. Hart said he had no comment and that he had not yet had the chance to review the scores for the second selection process.

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