In downtown Beaverton, the rise of a three-story, 300,500-square-foot high school is hard to miss.

Structures are taking shape, and Skanska USA Building managers and district officials said the new Beaverton High School is scheduled to open in August 2026. The project is expected to cost $253 million (as budgeted) including soft costs, with $221 million of that for direct construction.

The new school is next to the existing one, portions of which date to 1916. At some locations, the new structure is as near as 14 feet to the existing one.

Skanska is serving as the construction manager/general contractor for the project designed by Portland’s BRIC Architecture. About 220 workers labor on site each day.

“Things are clipping right along and looking good for opening next fall,” said Troy Boardman, senior superintendent for Skanska.

The new Beaverton High School will have three stories to host about 1,500 students. Given a limited footprint, designers had no choice but to go vertical.

“We had to make it three stories to meet the capacity requirements,” said Jeffrey Hamman, senior project manager for Beaverton School District.

The project is funded by a 2022 bond approved by voters. Of Beaverton School District’s 54 schools, the high school was most in need of an update, officials said, along with Raleigh Hills Elementary, which is also being rebuilt. Both schools are considered seismically vulnerable.

“A community priority was having a building that’s resilient,” said Aaron Boyle, facilities division manager for Beaverton School District.

Beaverton High is being built to Risk Category IV standards under the International Building Code, meaning it’s designed to be functional immediately after an earthquake.

Essentially, there will be two separate buildings. A seismic joint will allow the structures to move in an earthquake, sliding in a 16-inch gap. Portions of the buildings also will use SidePlate connection systems for resiliency.

Only the cafeteria, built in 2004, will be retained from the existing school. The cafeteria represents the district’s efforts to construct the new high school for “future readiness.” The cafeteria structure could be demolished in years to come in favor of a three-story building if growth drives enrollment well above today’s levels.

“We hope the way that we’ve constructed (the school) allows that flexibility,” Boyle said.

For today’s students, the new Beaverton High will feature 36 general education classrooms, eight science classrooms located in their own wing, three special-education classrooms, four career-and-technical education classrooms and two CTE labs. One classroom will be dedicated for three-dimensional art.

A two-story flex space will be available for a variety of uses. The theater will be wired for modern video and audio. A clinic operated by Virginia Garcia will provide health services to any student within the district.

A gym will have three full courts, an elevated one-eighth-mile track and capacity for 3,000 people to attend events. The gym will be framed by concrete panels that were formed on-site in pouring beds before being tilted up during a weekend with the help of a crane. Each panel weighs 220,000 pounds, Boardman said.

The new school frames a central, 15,500-square-foot courtyard. Walker Macy is the landscape architect for the project.

School entrances and exits will be strictly controlled, district officials said. The new school has no entrances along Southwest Farmington Road, a major thoroughfare.

The project team has had to work around Beaverton High’s busy events schedule while ensuring school staff and students are kept apart from construction activities.

“That has been the biggest challenge,” said Trevor Wyckoff, a Skanska executive vice president. “We’re only a few feet from the existing Beaverton High School during construction.”

Construction has gone smoothly, Skanska officials said. Electrical and mechanical equipment proved to be the most difficult materials to procure, but they were ordered early enough so that no delay resulted, Wyckoff said.

The impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs program has been minimal to date, Wyckoff said.

Major subcontractors contributing to the Beaverton High project include Apollo Mechanical Contractors, Prairie Electric, REFA Erectors, Goodfellow Bros. and Anning-Johnson Co.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article, Jeffrey Hamman’s name was misspelled. Also, he is senior project manager for the Beaverton School District, not Skanska.

The post New Beaverton High School on track to arrive in 2026 appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Construction is soon to start on the University of Portland’s new $40 million Shiley-Marcos Center for Design & Innovation. The university held a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday.

The new state-of-the-art building, designed by Opsis Architecture, will replace the former UP Physical Plant, located between Mehling Hall and the L-P Tennis Center.

The four-story, 45,400-square-foot structure will provide classrooms and spaces for UP students in all majors. It is also designed to meet LEED Silver sustainability standards.

Skanska USA is serving as the general contractor for the new center, which is anticipated to be complete in November 2023 and be open for UP students in January 2024.

The new building was made possible by a $10 million gift from local philanthropist Darlene Macros Shiley. The building is named after her late-husband and UP alumnus (class of 1951) Donald P. Shiley, who was the inventor of the first artificial tilting disc heart valve.

The post University of Portland breaks ground on $40M project appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Upgrades totaling more than $2 billion are taking place at Portland International Airport, and work on the largest single project is ramping up.

The $1.5 billion effort to transform the main terminal is one of several ongoing and planned projects at PDX to provide flexible, state-of-the-art facilities. Together, the projects are known as PDX Next.

“It’s really designed to take us out into the future,” said Vince Granato, chief projects officer with the Port of Portland.

On Thursday, the Daily Journal of Commerce hosted a Builder Breakfast virtual panel discussion during which executives from Portland’s Hoffman Construction, national giant Skanska USA and the Port of Portland talked about upcoming work at the airport.

Led by a joint venture of Hoffman and Skanska, the main terminal project will involve installation of a nearly 8.5-acre roof designed to withstand a strong earthquake.

Bids for the roof structure and related work are due Tuesday. That will be followed by the mechanical, electrical and demolition packages, for which documents are likely to be issued in November; bids will be due in December, said Joe Schneider, senior vice president in Skanska’s Portland office.

“There are opportunities there for sub-tier participation,” he said.

Next summer, contracts related to interior finish work will go out to bid, Schneider said.

PDX Next will deliver its first major project Wednesday, when the $215 million Concourse E extension, headed up by Skanska, is scheduled to open.

The main terminal, a stitched-together structure comprising six separate buildings that were constructed at different times under different codes, hasn’t been updated in more than 20 years, Granato said. The existing structure is seismically vulnerable, he added.

“That building would not survive” a 9.5-magnitude Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, he said.

ZGF Architects‘ design for the new main terminal building focuses on extensive use of wood to “keep the warmth and feel of the airport,” Granato said.

The Port of Portland held focus groups to help guide development of the PDX Next projects. Participants said they valued the existing airport, which is regularly ranked among the best in the United States.

“They basically said don’t screw it up,” Granato said. “We want to retain the soul of the airport, but we know it needs to change.”

The main terminal will be expanded 150 feet to the west from where it is today. That will provide more room for passenger security and health screening as well as flexibility for unknown future needs, Granato said.

The joint venture partners are working in integrated teams rather than parceling out some work for Skanska and some work for Hoffman.

“Creating a joint venture team that could tackle this, and could handle and bring the experience that was relevant to not only (the) local airport but national airports, I thought was really something that was important,” said Dave Garske, vice president of Hoffman Construction.

Other PDX Next projects include the Concourse B redevelopment, slated for delivery in summer 2021 by the Hoffman-Skanska joint venture, and the parking garage addition and rental car consolidation project, a $282 million build-out led by JE Dunn Construction that is scheduled for completion in fall 2021.

The PDX team is leveraging Skanska’s work at New York’s LaGuardia Airport for peer review as well as technical and logistical help, Schneider said.

Work at the airport has encountered a number of complications. Craft workers are now parking remotely and taking buses to the project site – an arrangement that creates challenges for social distancing. As a result, buses are running at a lower capacity. Schneider said he’s in discussions with port officials whether workers may be able to use a parking garage.

“That’s our current challenge,” Schneider said. “On this project, we haven’t had any delays, which is fortunate, but just a lot of creative thinking and a can-do attitude.”

The panel discussion was moderated by Paige Spratt, a Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt shareholder who focuses on construction and real estate law.

The post More airport work opportunities on tap appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

The longstanding shortage of skilled construction labor is forcing companies’ leaders to take more concrete action to remedy the situation.

A generational lack of workers can be attributed to aftereffects of the Great Recession, when hundreds of thousands of them left the industry in response to a lack of steady work. Now, however, construction is booming in the Pacific Northwest and other markets, and the total number of workers still has not reached the figures seen over a decade ago.

“It is has always been a concern to find enough skilled trades workers,” Kirby Nagelhout Construction President Jeff Deswert said. “Recently, if you look at the average age of our tradespeople, it’s not sustainable right now. What we’ll see is due to the efforts toward technology and higher education and the results of the recession, where nobody was entering the trades then. We’re going to find ourselves in a real pickle in the times ahead, not that we’re not in a pickle now.”

Deswert and his Bend-based company are taking action. Together with Central Oregon contractor Sunwest Builders, Kirby Nagelhout Construction is spearheading a public-private partnership with Central Oregon Community College to offer a to prospective construction workers.

Operating much like pre-apprenticeship programs in the Portland-metro area, the COCC course offers students an introduction to construction – instruction of both technical skills and soft skills.

“It definitely started with the contractors coming to us,” said Rachel Knox, the continuing education program manager at COCC. “For a long time, we wanted to do something here in Central Oregon, but we really didn’t know where to start. So when it landed in my lap I made a commitment that we would start this fall. It’s not a perfect start, but we’re just getting going.”

The non-credit course started last month and will run for six weeks. Classes are held two nights a week in workshop space provided by the Bend college. The first 14 students are being taught the very basics of the industry, including how to read blueprints, carry out construction math, prevent injuries, use tools and communicate clearly. The basic expectations of the industry, such as punctuality, are laid out for students.

Deswert and Steve Buettner, owner of Sunwest Builders, are lead instructors for the course. They are joined by tradespeople from other partners, including Griffin Construction, Hayden Homes, Northwest Framing Systems, Miller Lumber, Skanska USA, the Central Oregon Builders Association and CS Construction.

These firms also helped set up the Central Oregon Community College Construction and Trades Scholarship Fund to support students pursuing a career in construction. The COBA was especially helpful, contributing $50,000 toward the cause, Knox said.

The program is based on National Center for Construction Education and Research curriculum, which is also used by Portland’s Northwest College of Construction for its apprenticeship programs.

“We’re trying to address the most painful skills gap first,” Knox said. “We’re starting at the absolute basics, and really there are so many pain points. Some of it is technical skill for sure, and some of it is the soft skills like how do we get them to ask (instructors) intelligent questions and build confidence.”

The program will be more refined by next year, Knox said.

“We’re just at the launch right now,” she said.

The industry’s workforce situation, Deswert said, is not just a product of the recession, but also the public education system’s long-standing devaluation of skilled trades. Deswert acquired in high school valuable welding skills that allowed him to find employment immediately after graduation. From there, he worked his way through the ranks to eventually become a company president. That path barely exists anymore, he said. Yet there are signs of change.

“We’re seeing that the high school levels are starting to put CTE programs back in place where they were really missing for the last couple of decades,” Deswert said. “The education community has heard our cry loud and clear and I think we’re seeing that.”

The COCC program, he added, is at least in part a response to that.

“We’re wanting to add on to what the school systems are coming back to,” he said. “It’s best for kids who learn hands-on, and the school systems are seeing that.”

The students are now approaching the end of the program, which had them construct two small structures in a college workshop space. The course’s classroom portion takes up a minority of students’ time.

“It has to be very hands-on,” Knox said. “If we’re in the classroom for more than about an hour and a half we’re going to lose these folks; they gravitate toward construction because they don’t want to be in the classroom.”

Another part of the issue, Knox added, is that it is really a community-wide discussion.

“We are talking to the high schools and their CTE programs, all the alternative programs, the GED programs,” she said. “And if I’m doing this, I’m holding a pipe and I don’t have a pipeline. So what we’re more interested in is how … we find ways to link up to other options in Central Oregon.”

The post Bringing construction instruction back to school appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.