A two-building development that will bring a total of nearly 200 units of affordable housing to Portland’s Powellhurst-Gilbert neighborhood advanced last week, as construction funding was approved for the first phase and notice of a Type II adjustment review was issued for the second.

Central City Concern and Related Northwest are teaming on the phased development of a pair of properties at Southeast Division Street and 115th Avenue. The first phase, the $15 million Division Street Apartments, will include 40 single-room occupancy units and 20 studios. The second phase, the $38.3 million 115th at Division, will include 138 apartments – a mix of studios and units with one, two or three bedrooms.

Both buildings are designed by Ankrom Moisan Architects and will be built by Walsh Construction Co.

Portland City Council last week approved construction financing not to exceed $8.475 million for the Division Street Apartments, at 11332 S.E. Division St. The project is the first of two to be awarded funding through the Portland Housing Bureau‘s 2018 notice of available funding for permanent supportive housing. All 60 low-barrier housing units in the building will rent for $500 per month; 40 will serve homeless individuals with mental health issues, and 10 will be reserved for individuals with severe mental illness.

According to Ryan Hood, a project manager with Related Northwest, the project team is planning to close on the property on May 28 and break ground at the beginning of June. Construction of the three-story building is expected to require about 13 months.

The four-story 115th at Division will rise on a 1.02-acre lot at 11518 S.E. Division St. The new building will feature a large central courtyard and 87 vehicle parking spaces. Shapiro Didway Landscape Architecture is the project’s landscape architect. A Type II adjustment review will address locating vehicle access from a driveway near the property’s southern end, as the Portland Bureau of Transportation will not allow curb cuts on Division Street.

Funding for the project will come from a $258.4 million housing bond approved by voters in November 2016. The development team is hoping to close on the property in late October and break ground shortly afterward, Hood said. Construction is expected to require about 16 months.

The building is primarily intended to serve households making between 30 and 60 percent of the area median income. Seven of the units are to be set aside as permanent supportive housing. The proximity of the building to the Division Street Apartments will allow for residents elevating out of permanent supportive housing units to remain in the immediate community by transitioning to living at 115th and Division. Further, both buildings’ proximity to Central City Concern’s Blackburn Center will allow residents to access that facility’s comprehensive services, which include health care, addiction treatment and employment assistance.

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After spending the past 12 years running a landscape architecture firm, Steve Shapiro has retired. His initial plans? Running and gardening.

“It feels a little strange,” said Shapiro, who in August stepped down from his leadership position with Shapiro Didway – the firm he co-founded with partner Blair Didway in 2007. “My immediate goal – I like doing marathons – is that I want to finish doing one in every state. I’ve done 112 so far, but I have about 30 states to go. And after living in my house for 32 years I’d like to finish my own personal garden.”

Shapiro made such an impact during his professional career that he left some business associates wanting more.

“I’m very sad that he’s retiring, and it’s going to leave a big void in terms of our work and the relationship we’ve had with him,” TVA Architects founding partner Robert Thompson said. “He’s got an amazing body of work behind him. He’s one of a very few. There are Peter Walker, Laurie Olin, Rich Haag, and I would put Steve right in the same category as those great landscape architects.”

Shapiro, a protégé of late landscape architect Robert Murase, said he always had a love of nature and gardening. He attended the University of Florida and eventually began working with an environmental planning firm. There, he studied Lake Okeechobee and the decline of the Florida Everglades.

In the early 1980s Shapiro moved across the country to take a job as an urban planner with Clark County in Southwest Washington. While this was more to his liking, he also realized in time that he wanted to shift his career more toward design. That’s how he ended up working with Murase Associates for 13 years. It was the single most important move of his career.

“A whole new world was opened up because (Murase) did some projects around here, and he did huge projects around the world,” Shapiro said. “They were large scale and really interesting. There were high-end residences, a new town in Japan, an 80-acre equestrian center in Florida; it was interesting and I don’t know why he kept me.”

While gradually learning the ins and outs of design, Shapiro also used his writing skills to help market the firm’s work.

“My main job was doing proposals,” he said. “Gradually I started going with him places and learned what design was all about. And that also helped me when I started a business, because I didn’t run this by myself; I had Blair as a partner.”

While with Murase Associates, Shapiro met Thompson and others who later became reliable collaborators on projects around the region. Shapiro worked with TVA Architects on nearly two dozen buildings totaling over 1.5 million square feet at the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton. They also collaborated on the Japanese American Historical Plaza in downtown Portland; the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington; Esther Short Park in Vancouver, Washington; and many more.

“Personally, I think Steve’s about the most talented landscape architect in Portland, and he understands the architecture of landscape in a different way than most landscape architects that we’ve worked with,” Thompson said. “He’s extremely understanding of the relationship between the form of the buildings and how that translates into the form of the landscape and how they reinforce each other.

“He’s very modest and he’s an extremely gentle, nice guy,” Thompson added. “And he’s a great collaborator, which might be one of the best compliments you can give a designer. He listens, loves to engage in collaborative ideas, and I think the byproduct of our work, the success of our work, is a byproduct of that collaboration.”

Scott | Edwards Architecture principal Rick Berry has worked with Shapiro for nearly 20 years and singled out the landscape architect’s ability to sell clients on a particular design.

“He is just a charismatic person and just could bring life to any project,” Berry said. “What’s really exciting about Steve is how he can take a client and lead them on a journey and people would just jump on board. The way he spoke, he really could tell a story about the design and you could see people literally follow along.”

Despite the accolades earned from large commercial projects, Shapiro said his greatest professional satisfaction likely comes from the intricate gardens he has designed for private residential clients.

“From working with Bob Murase I really learned about what and how a garden can make you feel,” Shapiro said. “It’s the spiritual side, and dealing with living entities that do have a force that’s not measurable; you walk into a beautiful garden and it just creates an aura of calmness. It’s why I call my own personal garden my happy place.”

Berry noted that Shapiro also had a knack for creating beautiful transitions between the built environment and the natural world.

“The way he could explain the landscape and bring it to a personal level, it was super cool,” Berry said. “He got right down to the nitty-gritty and he had a vision that people were excited about. That’s why we kept working together, and each time it was something different. There was perfect harmony between the landscape and the architecture, and that’s a really important thing.”

Eventually, Shapiro decided he needed to forge his own path in the industry. So he broke away from Murase Associates joined forces with Didway. Business for Shapiro Didway looked promising at first, but then the Great Recession took hold.

“We suffered the ups and downs of the economy, and the recession was pretty brutal,” Shapiro said. “In October of ’08 all our work disappeared. Within a two-week period we lost six months’ worth of work, and there wasn’t much to take its place.”

The firm endured, however, and eventually rebounded and grew.

“We had one job to carry us for a while,” Shapiro said. “And then as the economy improved we started hiring staff – and we still have most of that staff.”

The experience created a tight-knit, united firm, he added.

“It’s a team-oriented firm,” he said. “I’ve just worked with our core group of people over the years. Blair and I did; it wasn’t just me.”

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Designers of the new child development center at Portland Community College‘s Rock Creek campus, in Washington County, had to account for two very different groups: children and college students.

“It’s a fun, energizing, open and friendly space,” PCC project manager Zahava Jones said. “We wanted to see that and I think we accomplished that. It’s a simple, house-style design, but it still fits with the college atmosphere.”

The $7 million, bond-funded facility is now substantially completed. It features a single story of wood-framed construction atop a slab-on-grade foundation. The 7,800-square-foot building will be able to hold up to 88 children, in separate infant, toddler and preschool classroom areas.

Efforts to secure a third-party vendor to manage and operate the child care center are ongoing, Jones said, but added that Portland-based Fruit & Flower is one of the leading contenders.

Ground was broken in spring 2018, and officials expect the facility to open by the start of the 2019 fall semester. Child care will be reserved for parents enrolled at PCC, but may be opened to the public in the future.

Scott | Edwards Architecture designed the building, while Shapiro Didway handled design of the exterior grounds. Kirby Nagelhout Construction is the general contractor.

“The challenge I think for the design on this project was to create a building that’s appropriate for a college campus,” said Bob Smith, a project manager for Scott | Edwards Architecture. “With the exterior we used very durable materials, and we tried to blend it with the palette of the rest of the campus with its concrete and metal and wood accents.”

The goal for the interior was to create a “playful, enjoyable and exciting” environment, Smith said.

“We tried to do that with colors and accents,” he said. “But we’re recognizing that it still is a campus building, and it needs to be resilient and durable.”

The facility was designed to resemble a family residence. It features gable ends and a pitched roof, with large bay windows adorning the main hallway.

Composite siding, with a surface manufactured from rice husks, dominates the exterior. The siding is sustainable, but also durable and able to effectively absorb paint and other finishes.

The external cladding is a limestone plaster formulation that comes with an alkali- and UV-resistant permanent finish.

“We approached this looking at the durability and quality of the materials for everything we selected,” Smith said.

Metal panels were used near the entrance to provide a waterfall effect in combination with an ADA-mandated wheelchair ramp.

Special attention was given to the outdoor play area.

“We tried to vary an outdoor learning environment and give the kids play on a variety of different surfaces,” said Carl Liebhardt, a landscape associate with Shapiro Didway. “There are seating areas for outdoor education and there are stepping services for motor skills play. We tried to allow the outdoor area to be a fluid environment for the kids to run around and play in.”

Honey locust trees will provide shade, and ginkgos, dogwoods and maples will serve as accents.

The outdoor play area was also carefully landscaped with sand and other native species along with a host of wooden play features carved from Oregon white oak.

The project team is aiming for Earth Advantage gold certification. Brightworks provided early energy modeling.

“We have a very robust envelope, and we’ve worked closely with PCC to design it as resilient as it can be,” Smith said. “We haven’t really done anything exceptional with over-insulating, but we made some upgrades along the way as part of the Earth Advantage transition.”

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The proposal for Civic Northwest – a massive transit-oriented development in Gresham – has received design approval.

Gresham’s Design Commission last week voted 4-1 to approve YBA Architects‘ design for the Wood Partners project, which calls for construction of eight buildings on a 7.4-acre parcel at the southwest corner of Northwest Civic Drive and Council Drive. The property is not far from TriMet‘s Civic Drive MAX station.

“Conceived as a ‘village on a hill,’ the development is a keystone within the larger Civic Neighborhood District and is devised to establish an urban, pedestrian-oriented center for neighborhood residents,” YBA Architects owner and principal Matt Brown stated in an email.

The total new floor area planned in the eight buildings, Brown stated, will be roughly 290,000 square feet. Two five-story mixed-use buildings, a four-story mixed-use building, four three-story apartment buildings and a retail pavilion will make up the development. Collectively, the structures are expected to hold at least 318 residential units and more than 12,000 square feet of retail space.

The half-acre plaza will be activated by multiuse play spaces and flexible commercial spaces on the ground floors of the five-story mixed-use buildings. The single-story, 1,200-square-foot micro-restaurant pavilion, meanwhile, will be the focal point of the entire development. The project team hopes it will become an 18-hour center of activity.

One site challenge for designers is that it features a nearly 25-degree grade change from the highest point to the lowest. To take advantage of this, Brown stated, a pair of woonerfs – spaces shared by vehicle drivers and pedestrians – will extend into the middle of the site to connect the upper and lower terraces. In addition, several open areas will be integrated.

In wider terms, the development fits within the Civic Neighborhood Vision and Design District Update approved by the city in 2017. That plan updated rules to remove obstacles for large developments of this type and also established design standards for new construction.

Civic Northwest project team members will next enter the permitting process, Brown stated. The goal at this point is to break ground this summer.

In addition to Wood Partners and YBA Architects, the team includes landscape architect Shapiro Didway Landscape Architecture and civil engineer Harper Houf Peterson Righellis Inc. The general contractor will be a firm affiliated with Wood Partners.

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A new mixed-use building on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard marks the first mid-rise infill venture for TMT Development – a firm most known for building downtown towers including Park Avenue West, Fox Tower and 1000 Broadway.

The Marilyn is a four-story building with nearly 5,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space and 59 apartments, 12 of which are affordable to households earning 60 percent or less of the area median family income due to the developer utilizing Portland’s Multiple-Unit Limited Tax Exemption (MULTE) program. Residential amenities include a top-floor community room and outdoor patio, bike storage, a pet area, and an at-grade parking garage with 22 spaces.

The building is named after the late Marilyn Moyer; she was the wife of TMT Development founder Tom Moyer and grandmother of current President Vanessa Sturgeon. TMT has owned the property since the gasoline shortage of the 1970s, when Tom Moyer purchased what was then a filling station to ensure that supplies could reach his chain of movie theaters throughout the western United States. Most recently, the site was used by Kruger’s Farm as an open-air market and produce distribution point.

LRS Architects designed the building, which includes lower, set-back corners in order to fit with the scale of the neighborhood. The project team spent a lot of time with neighbors discussing the design, and Sturgeon says there’s potential for TMT to tackle more developments like this one.

“This project has gone much better than we would have expected,” she said. “You have to be very careful in a residential neighborhood like this, and we don’t want to disrupt people’s lives. But this project has gone very well in that way, so I think we might be ready to try it again.”

Bremik Construction served as general contractor for the project, which has a slab-on-grade foundation, second-floor post-tensioned concrete deck, and wood framing on the upper floors. AAI Engineering was the structural engineer, Humber Design Group was the civil engineer, and Shapiro Didway served as the landscape architect. Commercial Realty Advisors NW is representing the commercial space, and Guardian Real Estate Services is managing the residential portion.

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Bremik Construction is putting the finishing touches on a new four-story mixed-use building at North Williams Avenue and Mason Street, in Portland’s Boise neighborhood. The Silica contains three stories of leasable open office space over ground-floor retail space and an at-grade parking garage. The project was developed by Ruben J. Menashe Inc., and was designed by William Kaven Architecture.

The concrete and heavy timber structure consists of a concrete podium up to the second level, two concrete cores, and upper floors framed with glulam beams and three-by-six car decking with a concrete topping slab. Bremik self-performed the timber framing and the concrete work on the building, which features multiple board-formed concrete walls. A curtain wall skin allows ample light penetration into the office spaces, which have floor-to-floor heights of about 13 feet.

The top two floors measure approximately 9,000 rentable square feet, while the second level has about 10,500 rentable square feet and a 700-square-foot outdoor terrace. Each of the upper floors contains a 329-square-foot balcony with large sliding doors. The building’s ground floor contains five retail spaces totaling around 4,500 square feet and a parking garage with a 13-car stacker and seven surface spaces. There are multiple racks for bicycle storage, and each of the office floors has a shower room.

KPFF Consulting Engineers handled structural and civil engineering, and Shapiro Didway served as the landscape architect. Colliers International is the broker of the office space, and Urban Works Real Estate is representing the building’s retail component.

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The final pieces of an ambitious project to beautify a string of Columbia River Gorge destinations are finally falling into place.

The Gorge Hubs are a series of by the West Columbia Gorge Chamber of Commerce to provide destinations for travelers, particularly hikers and bicyclists moving along the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail.

“The chamber did this to attract people to stop in their communities,” said Jessel Champoux, lead designer with Portland landscape architecture firm Shapiro Didway. “So, there are economic development opportunities for these communities instead of them being a pass-through, and that was a huge emphasis for us.”

The Gorge Hubs will share standard design features and pedestrian and cyclist amenities. Yet each one will include details unique to its respective community.

Now, the ones near the trail’s west end, in Wood Village and Troutdale, have been given a .

Wood Village’s Hub will be in Donald L. Robertson Park, where cyclists can begin their journey east into the Gorge. The park will have amenities including picnic shelters, restrooms and water facilities.

Meanwhile, Troutdale’s Hub will be adjacent to its Depot Rail Museum, where Atlanta-based Southern Pride Equipment Painting renovated a vintage Union Pacific caboose in 2016. A small plaza and railway-inspired wooden shelter will be built next to the caboose. Bike racks and a fix-it station will also be included.

As with other Hub sites, a decorative stone wall, similar to those found along the Historic Columbia River Highway, will form an instantly recognizable perimeter.

Standard Hub signs will be placed off of the highway to direct travelers, and portable restrooms and wooden picnic tables will be provided on new concrete pads near an existing walking trail.

“I think it’s a fine balance,” Champoux explained. “Each of the parks has standardized amenities because it’s for supporting tourists. … There’s also parking in both locations and a standardized, consistent look, but it’s unique to each town center too.”

The context of location was very important to consider, she added.

“It’s a balance of both,” she said. “Consistency is important because the objective is that people recognize it as a Hub so they will stop.”

Both Wood Village and Troutdale received from Metro a Regional Travel Options grant allowing development of engineering documents for their respective Hubs.

Elsewhere in the Gorge, the Cascade Locks Hub was dedicated in 2016. It’s located in the city center, next to Overlook Park. The Hood River Hub opened in 2015 in downtown with new public restrooms.

The easternmost Hub, in The Dalles, is in Lewis and Clark Festival Park. And in Mosier, where the concept was born, a well-developed Hub sits in the town center to welcome cyclists and provide basic conveniences. Plans exist to expand the Mosier Hub in the future.

For now, design documents will be used to secure final funding for construction of the Wood Village and Troutdale Hubs.

“Wood Village, I anticipate that will be built first,” Champoux said. “There’s a lot more stuff happening on site in Troutdale in addition to a bike hub, so I think that will take a little longer to build. But they’re going to go after funding, and the goal is to build both as soon as possible.”

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A pair of apartment projects completed recently mark the first forays into new development in the Portland-metro market by The ConAm Group, a San Diego-based multifamily development, acquisition and management firm. Pavilion Construction and Shapiro Didway served as the respective general contractor and landscape architect for both projects: Cadence Apartments, a 166-unit mid-rise structure on North Williams Avenue in Portland’s Eliot neighborhood, and Haven Apartments at Orenco Station, a 150-unit garden-style development on five acres in Hillsboro.

SERA Architects designed the Cadence Apartments, which last week was granted a temporary certificate of occupancy and will be turned over in August. The building features five stories of wood-framed apartments, ranging in size from studios to two-bedrooms, over a below-grade parking garage with 85 vehicle parking spaces, bicycle storage and repair space, and a dog wash. The U-shaped building also features a courtyard with a projection screen and amphitheater seating as well as outdoor grilling space. Also, a top-floor “Rhythm Lounge” includes a kitchen and “kegerator,” plus a deck with panoramic views of downtown Portland.

The Haven Apartments at Orenco Station consists of eight buildings of one-, two- and three-bedroom units built on a former nursery property around the 111-year-old McGill-Pitman House. The project included relocation of a garage to be closer to the still-occupied farmhouse. A towering old oak tree was kept in place as part of a condition of development of the property. The units began leasing in February, and a grand opening celebration was held last week to mark the recent completion of the final building in the complex. The project was designed by Seattle-based NK Architects, and features amenities including a swimming pool, a hot tub, a billiards room, a fitness area, conference space, and outdoor fire pits and grilling stations.

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Saving lives doesn’t necessarily have to be a utilitarian exercise; it can be artistic, too.

That’s the path taken by a recent landscape design project on the central Oregon coast carried out by Portland firm Shapiro Didway. The firm completed site master planning for the , which is housed in the historic former Delake Elementary School along congested Highway 101 in the middle of the popular tourist resort town.

The cultural center has hosted a popular farmers market for many years, but it has been held on the front lawn of the center at the edge of the busy, five-lane highway. This has proved hazardous to market patrons in the past, and center officials have long been eager to fix the issue. That’s where Shapiro Didway came into the picture.

But what started as an ordinary project quickly morphed into a push for improved safety along with the creation of a pleasing aesthetic.

“Originally, (the plan) was to create expanded space for the farmers market, and take the chaotic parking lot and increase the parking and pedestrian safety and circulation through the lot,” said Jessel Champoux, a design associate with Shapiro Didway and the project lead. “But what came from the project was instead of just looking at it like that, we looked at the art component; how can we make the whole site function as the vision of the Cultural Center?”

As currently comprised, the site master plan calls for an estimated $1.6 million worth of construction work, including future streetscape improvements, a revamped parking lot and space and utilities for outdoor events and seasonal displays. The farmers market will benefit from an increased amount of space along with a new path that will allow vendors better access to stall spaces.

“The biggest concern at first is it’s just not a safe site,” Champoux said. “If you’ve been (to the) farmers market on a Sunday, it’s a little chaotic, and I think that’s what drove the project. It’s well attended by the public and they want to connect the site to other locations. Conceptually, there are a lot of ways they want this to be a hub.”

There’s also a strong public art component, from accent paving to permanent and temporary art displays to new building murals and outdoor classroom space.

The notion of beautifying what essentially is a hazard mitigation project was driven by input received during public outreach efforts early in the process.

“There are public art opportunities all over this project,” said Niki Price, executive director of the Lincoln City Cultural Center and chair of the city’s Public Arts Committee. “There is stamp/paint concrete, embellishing the walk, there are opportunities at every entrance. Really, the sky is the limit.”

The former school building was closed years ago by the Lincoln County School District because its sits in a tsunami inundation zone just a block from the beach. As a result, the building and grounds became quite neglected prior the city transforming the property into an arts center over a decade ago.

“There is part of the redevelopment that needs to be done just for safety and security and utilization,” said Price. “The other part of the development, which is the most exciting part for the Cultural Center, is to turn the rest of the space into programmatic space all the way around the building. It’s going to allow us to use our entrances and exits and the architectural features we have to much better advantage, to create small gathering places all around the building and spaces for public art.”

To get started, the city’s budget committee has approved inclusion of $256,000 for the center in the city’s budget for 2018-19, which is awaiting final approval. A small portion of that amount would be used to replace windows in the school building, as well as for additional design and engineering work on portions of the master plan. Most of the money, however, will be used for grant writing or as matching grant funds.

“Just construction alone is going to be $1.6 million,” Price said. “The next year is design and we start our capital campaign. We’re pushing fast, relatively speaking, to get in line for cultural capital grants and maybe funds from the Legislature. But without the city buy-in, we felt like we we’re dead in the water, so we were happy the city looks like they’ll put in the seed money.”

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A renovation project is under way in Northwest Portland to repurpose a pair of 1940s-era industrial buildings into a creative office space. R&H Construction began work earlier this year on the LEVER Architecture-designed Redfox Commons, which will feature approximately 55,000 square feet of divisible office space intended to reflect the industrial character of the neighborhood.

The two buildings, formerly known collectively as The Old Freeman Factory, are located along Northwest Wilson Street between 26th and 27th avenues, one block east of the Montgomery Park building. They will be joined by a glass-enclosed breezeway that will serve as the building’s main entry and reception area. The buildings’ old-growth timber posts, beams and joists have been sandblasted and cleaned, and will remain exposed as part of the industrial look.

Mezzanines will be constructed in both of the buildings, and ample daylight penetration will be afforded by a series of skylights. The building will be clad in weathering steel that will take on a reddish color with exposure to the elements. The project is being built by L&L Investment Partners in a joint venture with California-based Belay Investment Group/CalSTRS.

The project team also includes structural engineer KPFF Consulting Engineers, civil engineers WDY Structural + Civil Engineering, and landscape architect Shapiro Didway. The property is being represented by JLL. Completion of the core and shell is expected by the end of this year.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect the correct owner and broker.

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