A ceremony was held Friday to celebrate the grand opening of the Knight Cancer Research Building, a $190 million facility on Southwest Moody Avenue in Portland’s South Waterfront. A joint venture of Andersen Construction and McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. built the SRG Partnership-designed project for Oregon Health Sciences University.

The seven-story structure houses laboratory and office space with capacity for 650 employees, including experimentalists, technicians, researchers and support staffers, united under one roof with the mission of working collaboratively to eradicate cancer.

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For the to open, all it took was a gradual transformation of Portland’s South Waterfront District from shipyard scrapping to health care, intensive transportation infrastructure spending and a $500 million donation from Nike billionaire Phil Knight to kick-start fundraising.

Now all the people inside the building have to do is cure cancer.

Oregon Health & Science University‘s latest project will open to the public on Monday. Already, employees have begun to move in. The seven-story, 320,000-square-foot building fronting Southwest Moody Avenue will soon have 450 employees, with capacity for 650.

The building’s opening is the culmination of a joint venture by Andersen Construction and St. Louis-based McCarthy Building Companies Inc. OHSU used the integrated project delivery method, bringing in the contractors along with architecture firm SRG Partnership early in the process.

“Andersen had a lot of local knowledge and experience with local contractors, and McCarthy is much larger and has a lot of experience with larger buildings,” said Tiffani Howard, OHSU’s program director for research, strategy and operations.

The integrated project delivery (IPD) framework minimized surprises, Howard said.

“That decreases the amount of redesign and put more of the value back into the project,” she said.

Andersen Construction was able to attract subcontractors to the project, said Todd Duwe, vice president of business development for the firm.

“In this tight labor market, relationships are important to get the best labor pool and attract the best trade partners to a project,” he said. “Between us, we created a culture where people wanted to work on this project.”

Andersen and McCarthy created a separate, registered entity for the project. SRG Partnership brought its experience with IPD projects, including the Oregon Capitol renovation, the Multnomah County Courthouse project and the proposed 4th and Montgomery Building project being led by Portland State University.

“Our firm has really spent a lot of time on how to be collaborative with the client and contractors,” SRG spokesman Kip Richardson said. “We believe it is absolutely the best way to deliver a project. When you get everybody’s best ideas at the table, you get a better result.”

OHSU led the 91ĘÓƵ on a tour of the Knight Cancer Research Building ahead of the public opening. The building is a close sibling of OHSU’s Collaborative Life Sciences Building next door, mirroring its modern materials and scale. The Knight Cancer Research Building features ample glass, concrete and steel, with wood employed sparingly as an accent material.

The site, OHSU’s Schnitzer campus, formerly served as a shipping scrapyard.

Visitors to the $190 million building will notice a massive video screen – approximately 9 feet high and 50 feet long – that wraps around the upper lobby. The screen is meant to communicate with the public about the research building’s mission, Howard said.

The screen came from Planar, a Hillsboro-based company that provided most of the screens in the building at cost, Howard said. Serenity Studios produced the content shown on screen.

The bulk of space inside the building is dedicated to research. Of the seven floors, four are largely dedicated to lab space. The ground floor has lobby space and an auditorium that seats up to 300 people. Floors 2-5 are dedicated to lab space. The sixth and seventh floors have administrative offices, a large conference room and a terrace room.

The lab space was built with flexibility in mind. Utilities are located overhead and benches can be moved.

“We really didn’t know where the technology’s going to take us over the next 50 years, so it didn’t make sense to build everything in,” Howard said.

The labs are also large to allow collaboration. Each lab pod has space for 36 researchers. OHSU hopes that fosters collaboration across labs, Howard said.

The building also has an “enormous generator” in the basement, capable of keeping power on for 48 hours before needing to be refueled, she said.

Inside the lobby, a quote from Knight’s announcement graces the wall: “Is there a higher calling than curing cancer?”

On Wednesday, workers were finishing final tasks. Chuck Dusa with Oregon Commercial Paint painstakingly painted a portion of a 10,000-dot wall. Each dot represents a donor.

“They’re looking for a certain texture, so we’re going over the dots more than once,” he said.

It won’t take long for the building to host a major event. The international Early Detection of Cancer Conference is coming to the Knight Cancer Research Building on Oct 2-4.

Minority-owned or women-owned firms accounted for 16.5 percent of the subcontracted work, exceeding the goal of 15 percent. The building is on track to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum status from the U.S. Green Building Council, according to OHSU.

Visit /news/2018/09/07/photos-inside-the-knight-cancer-research-building/ to view more photos of the building.

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The new Knight Cancer Research Building is still a work in progress, as Oregon Health and Science University officials will readily admit.

At the same time, the university is so confident in the future of the planned 320,000-square-foot facility that design features, construction methods and more were shown to a media contingent recently.

The seven-story, $190 million facility is being built on Southwest Moody Avenue, slightly north of OHSU‘s four-year-old Collaborative Life Sciences Building, in the South Waterfront District. It’s designed to be Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design platinum, and house more than 700 researchers, scientists and support staff. They will work in approximately 160,000 square feet of wet lab space, tackling subjects like computational biology in the fight against cancer.

Northwest firm SRG Partnership designed the building, which will have five floors of reinforced concrete and two additional floors of structural steel. Design elements were inspired by a wide array of sources. University employees and researchers, as well as the contractors and subcontractors hired on for the job, provided input.

“We want this to be the building where we end cancer as we know it,” said Dr. Brian Druker, director of the Knight Cancer Institute. “As you walk through this building, you’ll see that we designed this building to foster collaboration and teamwork and to foster the outcomes that we’re trying to generate in terms of helping advance the fight against cancer.”

SRG Partnership associate Nick Hemmer said designers engaged building trade partners early on and used their expertise to evaluate system options and potential efficiencies more smoothly using a shared building information model.

“In many instances we were able to find efficiencies in one system, which helped us achieve the owners’ goals in another – something that would have been much more challenging in a traditional delivery framework,” Hemmer stated via email.

OHSU’s project liaison, Dr. Tiffani Howard, explained how the building and its work spaces have been created to bring scientists and researchers together rather than allow them to escape into dead-end corridors and other hiding spots. Even the main corridors on each floor are designed to funnel people together.

“So, it’s this idea that we were talking about how we want to have this kind of collaboration by putting multiple labs together and working together in one space,” Howard said. “You can really increase collaboration across a much wider range of people.”

The building’s auditorium, designed to hold up to 240 people in tiered stadium seating, has at the back a glass-walled conference room able to accommodate up to 60 additional people. Other creative spaces include a large employee cafeteria and a top-floor lounge overlooking the Willamette River with Mount Hood in the background.

“One of the biggest moves was to celebrate the places in the building where the collaboration was occurring with light and views,” Hemmer said. “The laboratories were located along the south façade and interconnected with a light-filled corridor. Because of the unique saw-toothed south façade, all the laboratories have views of the river and the Tilikum Crossing.”

The research building is being constructed jointly by general contractors Andersen Construction and McCarthy Building Cos. They’re employing a liberal amount of modular construction, with vents, conduits, electrical wiring and other complex systems being fabricated off-site before being shipped to the job site for installation. The technique is helping save both time and money.

“This entire piece,” Howard said, gesturing overhead to a power bus that runs vacuum units installed in each lab bench, “was brought in and installed just like it is, and just the piping was hooked up here.”

Not only does prefabrication allow for greater cost efficiencies, Hemmer said, but also the collaborative design strategy allows for more use of prefabricated elements.

“This doesn’t limit what we can do,” he said, “but identifies possible efficiencies early enough that we can coordinate and take advantage of those opportunities. There are cost-efficiencies in fabricating on the floor in a shop, but also significant savings to the project schedule in doing so, which is always advantageous.”

The project team is using prefabricated multi-trade utility racks carrying mechanical ducts, plumbing, electrical and building controls, as well as 2.5-story duct risers that were craned into mechanical shafts built into the structure. A unitized curtain wall system using sheathing also was prefabricated prior to being shipped to the job site and installed across the building’s exterior. This is the first project on the West Coast to see pre-application of this Tremco-made product onto USG sheathing, Hemmer said.

“All of these are a result of the collaboration that took place,” he said.

While the building’s backbone – electrical, communications and ventilation elements – is prefabricated, the interior and its furniture will operate using similar modular principles. Take the lab benches themselves as an example, Howard said.

“You can move (elements in) this space in here into any configuration you (want) to,” she said.

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Union ironworkers with Raimore Construction topped out the seven-story Knight Cancer Research Building on Southwest Moody Avenue in the South Waterfront this week. The $160 million project is being built for Oregon Health & Science University by a joint venture of McCarthy Building Companies Inc. and Andersen Construction. The design is by SRG Partnership.

Two floors of structural steel have been erected atop five levels of reinforced concrete and a below-grade parking garage. Raimore crews began setting steel for level seven and the roof the second week of this month, and celebrated placement of the final beam on Monday. The project is only the second major structural steel job for the growing firm.

When finished, the 320,000-square-foot building will house approximately 600 researchers and administrators dedicated to cancer research. It will contain laboratory space, administrative offices, a 200-seat auditorium, cafes and ground-floor retail space. Project construction began in summer 2016 and is slated for completion in July 2018.

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