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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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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