Portland-based landscape architecture and planning firm Walker Macy will soon open a Seattle office.

The firm plans to establish a small office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood by July, founding principal Douglas Macy said. It will be led by principals Chris Jones and Lara Rose.

Walker Macy has worked on many projects in the Seattle-metro area, including some for online retailer Amazon near the South Lake Union neighborhood, Harborside Fountain Park in Bremerton and the Bothell campus plan for the University of Washington. The firm has long considered opening an office in the city, Macy said.

“There have been just a lot of work and ongoing relationships with people that’s going to be made easier by having an office there,” he said. “Many of our clients from the Seattle area have asked us to move there or have a presence there.”

The firm was set up this year to open a Seattle office mostly because it had key staff members willing to lead the expansion.

“At this point, we have the opportunity with the personnel that are available at our office to put in place two top-notch professionals in that office,” Macy said. “Part of the problem with starting a new office is having the right people to do it.”

Jones joined Walker Macy since 2005 and was promoted to principal this year. The firm recently added Rose, who previously was a principal in the San Francisco office of landscape architecture and planning firm Hargreaves Associates.

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MulvannyG2 Architecture, one of the 10 largest architecture firms in Portland, is closing shop – at least its one at 601 S.W. Second Ave.

The global design company will close its Portland office at the end of June, according to an email from Carla Thompson, MulvannyG2 global marketing director. In a statement issued by MulvannyG2, its decision “was based on positioning the firm to support … global clients in the most efficient and effective way.”

MulvannyG2, according to its website, is one of the 40 largest architecture firms in the world, as well as the “No. 2 retail architect” in the world. The company opened shop in 1971, and is headquartered in Bellevue, Wash.; however, it’s in the process of relocating to downtown Seattle, according to the Seattle Times. The firm’s other offices are in Irvine, Calif.; Washington, D.C. and Shanghai.

In Portland, MulvannyG2 employs 25 architects and 50 people overall – making it the eighth largest firm in town by number of registered architects, according to the 91��Ƶ’s “A List.” The firm employs 350 people worldwide.

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McKinstry, a Seattle-based mechanical-electrical contractor that has operated an office in Portland since 1969, recently opened a full-service office in Hillsboro.

The new office is needed to serve the company’s “confidential client in Hillsboro” (widely known as Intel), as well as other existing clients and emerging business opportunities west of Portland, said Joe Korte, general manager of the 10,000-square-foot facility on Northwest Evergreen Parkway.

“Our intention is to be able to provide those services available from our main office in closer proximity to our main clients,” he said. “We’ve had some great success in delivering a variety of construction services on the west side of Portland to the degree that it involved making those services readily available to those customers.”

McKinstry provides design-build-operate-maintain services for mechanical and electrical systems to clients building data centers, corporate campuses and advanced technology centers. Thirty employees are stationed at its new Hillsboro facility, Korte said.

Investments by the “confidential client” have spurred additional investments by related businesses in the area. Future work could include data centers and expansions, Korte said.

“I think right now in the industry, and in part with some of our key customers, they’re looking for new approaches for design and construction of their facilities,” he said. “They’re trying for innovative approaches that we’re perfectly aligned for.”

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The University of Washington’s newly opened Molecular Engineering and Sciences Building in Seattle has an interesting molecular makeup all its own: parts of the structure can cool and heat themselves without power.

In the walls and ceilings of the faculty offices, tiny packets of vegetable oil called bio-phase change materials, or bio-PCMs, are embedded to control the temperature. The waxen material inside the packets has a room-temperature melting point of about 73 degrees, so as the building warms during the day, the packets begin to melt and absorb heat energy from the sun. At night as the temperature outside cools, the packets release that heat and warm the interior. The packets then refreeze and become set to absorb the next day’s sunny rays.

The five-story, 90,374-square-foot, $78.5 million building opened in July, and the Seattle office of , the project’s architect, is tracking the performance of the bio-PCMs via sensors in the walls.

“It’s definitely working,” said Chris Flint Chatto, an associate partner at ZGF Architects in Portland who worked with the Seattle office. “You can see in places where we have PCMs the temperature stays more constant than places that don’t.”

A similar heat recovery chiller system uses PCMs to control the temperature of closed-loop water lines that run through the building and cool the microscope laboratories.

Chatto said bio-PCMs typically cost between $2 and $5 per square foot and that one square foot of the material is needed for every square foot of occupied space. So for a 20,000-square-foot office building, bio-PCMs would cost a premium of $100,000.

But the return on investment, Chatto said, comes from the fact that bio-PCMs make it possible to design a building without a cooling system. The faculty offices in the UW engineering building don’t have one, and that could cut down on energy consumption by as much as one third.

That design required some careful rethinking about how the building is ventilated. It uses elevator-like ventilation stacks that run the length of the building to draw air through the spaces. The naturally ventilated system is expected to cut down on energy consumption related to cooling in the office spaces by 98 percent annually.

That could prove to be a desirable trait to other building owners, considering that commercial buildings consume nearly 20 percent of the nation’s total energy supply – an increase of approximately 6 percent in the past 32 years, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy. Today, that energy is worth $200 billion a year.

The UW building is one of the first in the nation to employ the bio-PCM system.

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There’s something to be said for a good view, even if it doesn’t exist yet.

At least that’s the story with ‘s newest acquisition. The company recently purchased a 15,400-square-foot office building in downtown Seattle for $5.5 million.

Kelly Saito, president for Gerding Edlen, said the company plans to demolish the existing structure and build a 120-unit, mixed-use apartment building in its place. Located at 1519 Minor Ave., Saito said the location is the perfect nexus between the culture of Capitol Hill, Seattle’s business district and the downtown shopping core.

“And because you are on the uphill side of the freeway, you have these commanding and essentially protected sweeping views of the downtown,” Saito said. “If you were standing there on the site, you’d just have this killer view looking at all the high rises in the core there and toward South Lake Union.”

Saito said they were still in the early phases of design but that the building would include roughly 1,000 square feet of commercial space and would incorporate sustainable design aspects in keeping with the company’s development portfolio.

“It’s certainly safe to say we’ll look to create a very highly sustainable project, whether specifically this building has photovoltaics, or solar water, or rain water recapture – whatever it might be. Those things are still being worked out.”

Gerding Edlen has hired Portland-based as the project architect and Portland-based as its general contractor. He said they would likely be sending the project out to bid in early spring, with construction to follow shortly thereafter.

Pricing for the finished units is still being finalized, but Saito said they will likely be marketing the building toward a young professional demographic due to the large predominance of tech and life science companies situated close by.

Amazon.com’s corporate headquarters, for instance, is less than a mile away.

“If you were a good golfer, you could probably hit it with a driver,” Saito said.

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Ten years later, and Seattle‘s finally going to get a big hole to best them all.

Seattle’s populace voted on Tuesday to fund a $2 billion, 1.7-mile, 56-foot-wide highway tunnel that will replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct  near the Puget Sound. As William Yardley put it succinctly in the he wrote yesterday in The New York Times:

“…assuming that an earthquake does not devastate the tunnel or that its construction does not cause downtown to collapse on top of it (not going to happen, engineers say), the politics will eventually give way to one of the more ambitious public works projects in the country and a remarkable urban transformation.”

But, the specter of the botched in Boston – which cost tens of millions more than anticipated and took years longer than projected – looms over this ambitious project. Also, with earthquake experts magnitude-9 level earthquakes sometime in the foreseeable future, it all may be for naught.

Yet the project could reshape the waterfront of Seattle into something decidedly Northwest – cafes and brewpubs are at the forefront of plans to reshape the 22 acres of land that will be reclaimed. Also, it’s high time the city replaces the earthquake-damaged raised highway that snakes through the area like one of the many roadways in the tangled mess of Los Angeles. As someone who lived in that that urban open sore in the earthquake-riddled early 90s, I know such structures tend to

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Washington-based construction firm Kiewit-General-Manson proposed a low bid last Wednesday to replace the aging state route 520 bridge in Seattle. A really low bid; enough to buy a and still be within the state’s budget for the bridge project. While the Washington Department of Transportation won’t name which out of the three possible construction firms got the contract for a few weeks, Kiewit-General is currently building pontoons for the project. Something (overall austerity in state budgets) tells me it will get it.

The received earlier this month, ending 14 years of planning and analysis. The bridge connects Seattle to neighboring Medina and Bellevue. According to the , construction will begin on Lake Washington in 2012, with the goal to open the bridge to traffic in 2014. The design-build contract covers the following:

• The construction of a wider six-lane bridge with transit and bike/pedestrian ways
• Towing 33 concrete pontoon constructed in Gray’s Harbor to Lake Washington
• Building an additional 44 supplemental concrete pontoons and 58 anchors
• Building a connection to the eastside highway and building a new maintenance facility and dock on  Lake Washington.

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Opponents of Seattle‘s $2 billion highway tunnel project are hoping enough people vote ‘no’ on an Aug. 16 referendum that politicians will rethink the project.

The entire project, which entails replacing the raised Alaskan Way Viaduct on State Route 99 with an underground tunnel, will cost a total of $3.1 billion. But the tunnel portion of the project has been the hot-button issue almost since the highway was damaged by the Nisqually earthquake in 2001.

A ‘no’ on the referendum , as the Seattle Times reports. But tunnel opponents hope it will send a message to politicians  (a “we won’t reelect you” message). Opponents say the tunnel is too expensive and it will prompt more cars to . From the Seattle Times:

If we can’t afford the tunnel and it doesn’t work (to move traffic) and Seattle doesn’t even want it, that changes the calculus,” said Esther Handy, campaign manager for Protect Seattle Now, which put Referendum 1 on the ballot.

How long has Seattle been arguing about this project? Oh right, 10 years.

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Crews from Farrow Concrete place about 660 cubic yards of concrete to form the first of 17 base slabs in the Washington State Route 520 Pontoon Construction Project casting basin. Local contractor Bayview Redi-Mix provided the mix for the July 8 pour. (Photo courtesy of via Flickr)

Crews in Aberdeen, Wash., on Friday completed part of a $4.65 billion project to revamp part of State Route 520, which includes replacement of a floating bridge over Lake Washington.

The crews made the first concrete pour for a casting basin facility, which will eventually make 33 pontoons for the new bridge. The pontoons – sort of like really big, floating docks – are being made to support the new bridge. They’ll replace the current pontoons, if needed, in case the current ones are damaged in something like a big natural disaster. Some of the pontoons will be as tall as three-story buildings, as wide as two motor homes parked end to end, and as long as a football field. They’ll weigh as much as 11,000 tons each.

Pontoon construction is expected to start this summer and finish by mid 2014.

The casting basin facility  and the pontoons are themselves a $367 million project. The entire SR 520 project – which consists of a revamp of the highway from Seattle to Redmond, Wash. – will cost about $4.65 billion. Only about $2.62 billion of that has been received so far, according to the . WSDOT and contractor Kiewit-General began work in Aberdeen in February.

WSDOT has uploaded a ton of and has put up a project webcam, which you can see .

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