Another building on the rise in Portland will feature cross-laminated timber. The new headquarters for Harder Mechanical Contractors is being constructed in the Eliot neighborhood.

The two-story, 81,000-square-foot building was designed by Ankrom Moisan Architects. It’s being built at 2148 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., near the intersection with Thompson Street. The new building will replace Harder Mechanical’s former building on the same site. The new one will feature a structural steel frame with 56,000 square feet of cross-laminated timber (CLT) floors and a roof diaphragm with steel, buckling-restrained brace framing.

The project’s general contractor, Swinerton Mass Timber, self-performed installation of the CLT, carpentry and concrete work. Swinerton is already taking advantage of its new Timberlab facility, which opened in North Portland in January.

“One of the cool things about this project is that we actually fabricated all of the glulam columns and beams at our shop just two miles (from) here, on Columbia Boulevard,” said Sam Dicke, a business development representative for Swinerton Mass Timber. “So, really just being able to have that proximity to the shop to bring material in was big.”

Currently, Kraft Masonry crews are installing the dark gray brick that will dominate the building’s exterior, while Arrow Roofing & Sheet Metal is completing the roofing system. DR Johnson added rubber roofing membrane to the CLT panels bound for the roof prior to shipment.

“Swinerton took extra steps to protect the CLT, so when they came out, they had membrane already installed to protect it as soon as it was off the ground,” said Caroline Hather, an associate with Ankrom Moisan Architects.

Other major subcontractors involved in the project include Cochran Electric, Viking Automatic Sprinkler Company and Primo Construction.

The building will have a square layout, with a main entrance on the west side fronting MLK Jr. Boulevard and an employee entrance on the east side. These entries will connect to a double-height corridor that hosts a grand staircase topped by skylights that effectively illuminate the middle of the building. Open walkways, meanwhile, will run north-south on the second level to provide circulation between two main wings of office and conference space.

Exposed mechanical systems will be featured throughout. Naturally, Harder Mechanical is performing the plumbing and HVAC work for the project.

“I think what’s nice about it, actually, is when you look through the building you see just a lot of those wood beams; it’s going to be really great,” said Michael Strachan, marketing manager for Harder Mechanical. “And on top of that, it also gave us an opportunity with the CLT to expose a lot of the mechanical and plumbing and everything, so that also makes a lot of sense.”

Swinerton Mass Timber Project Executive Andrew Georgesen pointed out that the building being constructed is much different than the one envisioned originally.

“For this job, specifically, it was a testament to the teamwork it took us and Ankrom to get to,” Georgesen said. “When I came in it was about 50 percent (conceptual design), and the structural design was much different. It was kind of down to a more … glulam beam and car decking, but the owner really had a preference to use CLT.”

The structure originally was to include concrete shear walls, which were later swapped out for steel brace framing, Hather said. This change, she added, came about in part via use of virtual reality technology to explore different options.

“We did the VR to take the client through,” she said. “And we also went to a steel brace frame at that point. Originally, we had the shear with concrete, and something that’s kind of less typical in CLT buildings is to have the brace framing.”

The project team broke ground this past fall and began erecting structural elements toward the end of November. Installation of the CLT panels was completed early this year, and the building is now fully enclosed. Substantial completion is expected by mid-July.

The final result, Strachan said, is intended to not only give Harder Mechanical a new building with room to grow, but also one that fits within the historical context of MLK Jr. Boulevard and the surrounding neighborhood.

“The biggest thing on this building from a contextual standpoint besides the sizing of the windows was the material,” he said. “It had to incorporate masonry for a lot of reasons. There was a rustic feel. It’s an old material as we all know, but it let the building kind of settle here as if it’s been here a long time.”

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Cities, counties and public agencies in the Pacific Northwest are jumping on the mass-timber bandwagon. The city of Hillsboro, for example, has hired Swinerton to construct the Hidden Creek Community Center. The two-story, 51,500-square-foot facility will feature a mix of structural elements that include glulam beams and cross-laminated timber panels as well as concrete tilt-up panels and shear walls.

The $37 million building, designed by Opsis Architecture, is expected to serve as an example of how mass timber can be integrated into public works. Meanwhile, Washington County and the cities of Milwaukie, Hillsboro, Oregon City, Lincoln City and others are pursuing mass-timber projects.

“We now have more and more public entities in multiple states that we’re in plans for,” said Tym, a superintendent with Swinerton’s mass timber subsidiary who goes by a single name. “The success of our private partnerships showed us there’s a big learning curve, but we’re turning that into something that is predictable and cost-effective.”

The in Hillsboro also was constructed by Swinerton. That five-story, 156,000-square-foot structure was designed by Hacker and completed in 2018. Swinerton still regularly fields inquiries about how the project came together, Tym said.

“That was my first interaction with mass timber and CLT,” he said. “And those partnerships have really driven the idea of a sustainable, really aesthetically pleasing product into the mainstream of public works projects.”

The Hidden Creek Community Center is becoming one. It will feature a two-court gymnasium, with 90-foot-long glulam beams supporting CLT ceiling panels.

The building also will hold cardio and weight rooms, two exercise or dance rooms, community meeting rooms and more – all inside an open shell comprised largely of wood. The facility is being built on 20 acres of city-owned land across the street from 53rd Avenue Community Park.

Swinerton’s general contracting team has worked with its mass timber division as well as concrete and carpentry self-perform units. KPFF Consulting Engineers performed structural engineering. Calvert Co. of Southwest Washington fabricated the beams and columns, with one exception: The glulam beams used in the gymnasium were fabricated in Drain by American Laminators.

Finally, Austrian firm KLH Massivholz GmbH manufactured the five-ply cross-laminated timber panels used in the building’s ceilings and roof.

“Mass timber is really hot right now,” Swinerton project manager Greg Byrnes said. “Schedule-wise, the local (fabricators) are all filled up.”

One of the biggest challenges for the construction team, Byrnes said, was connecting the gym’s concrete walls with its massive long-span roof beams, as well as sealing the building envelope around them. Each glulam beam weighs 13,700 pounds. A NessCampbell Crane + Rigging crew flew them in.

“The insulation layer on the tilts connected with carbon fiber pins, and to stitch the whole thing together – those were a challenge,” Tym said. “I’ve never done the large beams and the clear story on top of it with compounding sloping elements (33 inches) on top of that. It has tapered column lines, and making sure everything was sound while we put it together was phenomenal.”

For Swinerton Mass Timber, each project presents something new.

“It’s evolving every day,” Tym said. “I have weekly, daily meetings about how the timber is going to interface with other mediums, how we’re making these connections and still sustaining the viability and technical ratings we require for these building types.

“We’re learning more and more that six, eight months out we have a heavy-loaded front end because of the planning and design work, but also for procurement and fabrication. All that work that comes on the front end is then dependent on having a good logistics and erection plan from the craft superintendent side.”

The connections and fasteners for each material are different and the plans are different, even down to the moisture barrier around those connections, Tym added.

“Every element we’re able to work with comes with new challenges,” he said. “But with the challenges we’re able to archive and make predictable these things for future projects.”

Because Swinerton operates nationally, it has a good handle on regional market trends. And those trends suggest mass timber is steadily rising in popularity.

“The market is absolutely exploding in California,” Tym said. “We are putting these projects up all over the country, but because this is an emerging market there are still constraints on who can provide, manufacture and deliver. Those supply chains are a critical element in deciding factors during pre-con.”

But as the market matures, he continued, companies are branching out into more specialized aspects of mass-timber construction.

“People might see it as niche right now, but what we’re seeing is that it’s going to be much more commonplace,” he said, driven in part by public-private partnerships like the one used for the Hidden Creek Community Center.

“If there’s a desire and growth in the market, new businesses are going to spawn from it,” Tym said. “The whole world is trying to go tall wood. We want high-rises and we want big stuff. There’s a lot of math by engineers to make these things behave properly, but we have great aspirations to make this mainstream enough and utilize these efficiencies so we can continue to grow bigger and make things look really beautiful.”

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Ben Kaiser, owner and principal of Kaiser Group + Path Architecture, believes the building industry can play a big role in reducing carbon emissions and combating global climate change by adopting mass-timber construction. So the multidisciplinary firm behind Carbon12, an eight-story mixed-use building in North/Northeast Portland that remains the tallest one in the U.S. made of mass timber, has decided to share its knowledge and experience.

Kaiser + Path is making available online all drawings, technical specifications and engineering documents related to Carbon12 at .

The obvious question is why?

“Sometimes I ask myself the same question,” Kaiser said. “It’s interesting because it’s such a new world, the world of mass timber, that we’d like more people to join us in the undertaking. We’re convinced it’s the correct path forward for the environment, but just us doing it by ourselves in Portland is not going to make that big of an impact. So we really feel the more people who can come and join us and build momentum, the better it will be for the environment and the timber industry in the Northwest.”

Portland firm Hacker is another early adopter of mass-timber construction, and recently moved into its new headquarters in District Office – a six-story, mass-timber office building in the Buckman neighborhood. Corey Martin, a Hacker principal, said he’s not particularly surprised by the decision by Kaiser + Path to release project documents.

“The mass timber movement is bringing together people and professionals in our world in ways that other things haven’t,” Martin said, “because the innovation and change in what’s possible is literally changing every minute as we work in real time. There’s a lot of mutual benefit for us to share. It’s like an open-source community that we have, so it’s fitting in with that.”

Carbon12, completed in 2018, took the industry by storm and generated substantial press for Kaiser + Path. The project team worked with city and state officials to circumvent restrictive codes limiting heights of wood buildings. Carbon12, at 85 feet, became the tallest building in the country with cross-laminated timber, glulam beams and columns, and other mass-timber elements.

“We were blown away by all the ways mass timber keeps improving the conversations,” Kaiser said. “We were glad we broke through the 65-foot height limit for wood; we now have a new precedent of 85 feet, and that was a big change for the United States.”

The project team knew it was the right path forward, Kaiser said. But additional benefits were found along the way. The project turned into a proving ground for mass timber, thanks to structural testing requirements pushed by the city and state.

“We kept discovering great things about the mass-timber products,” he said. “These are far superior in seismic events. These buildings are just 30 percent the weight of a concrete building, and you can imagine as you go higher, 70 percent less mass is a lot easier to restrain with regard to lateral forces.”

Mass-timber buildings also impact the foundation less, allowing their use on formerly polluted sites or brownfield sites.

“Carbon sequestration is why we got into it,” Kaiser said. “But the modularity, seismic superiority and the aesthetics all kept improving the conversation for us.”

Taylor Cabot, now a Swinerton Mass Timber project manager, served in that role for Kaiser + Path during the Carbon12 project.

“(Carbon 12) was built before codes, so we went pretty much where we wanted to go with it,” she said during a recent Women in Construction Week event. “There was no code path forward, and the city said, ‘This is beyond our scope.’”

The state of Oregon, however, provided more regulatory framework. The Oregon Building Codes Division was in the process of creating a method for reviewing cross-laminated-timber buildings for local jurisdictions and wound up collaborating with the city of Portland’s structural engineer, fire marshal and life-safety reviewer.

The result was a unique review process wherein the city was responsible for aspects of the building outside of the physical structure, while the state reviewed structural and fire and life safety elements.

“The good news is we took a pretty prescriptive path,” Cabot said. “It really allowed us to hear rumors or feel the feel of people getting nervous about what they were seeing and immediately addressing them. We’re still building a lot of buildings in Type III, but we will all be moving very quickly to Type IV, which has a lot of advantages and will speed up the process. I’m excited because this will allow projects to move through the permitting process a lot faster.”

The stream of industry inquiries and requests for information about Carbon12 also played a role in the decision to open it up for examination. Kaiser estimated the firm has given more than 200 tours of the building.

“That’s the exciting thing,” he said. “We’ve joined a like-minded community of folks internationally. If we were doing strip malls in Phoenix, no one would be calling us. But since we’re doing something innovative and exciting, we’re getting calls and visits from people around the world. That’s one of the nicest outcomes we hadn’t planned for.”

Martin wholeheartedly agrees.

“We all share the same consultants, the same engineers – there’s a lot of cross-pollination there,” he said. “Structural systems weren’t a thing we all looked at as a point of innovation for a long time in normal projects. But now, the structural system is this big question mark and this big point of conversation, so it’s really fun. That’s why we’re all wanting to share stuff.”

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