While most construction projects in Washington have been shut down temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, some public ones haven’t missed a beat. In Vancouver, crews are building multiple facilities for Vancouver Public Schools via money from a $458 million capital bond approved by voters in 2017.

One of the most unique projects is a roughly $10 million one to provide a new home for Fir Grove/Vista School, which serves approximately 70 of the district’s most vulnerable students.

The existing Fir Grove/Vista building at 2920 Falk Road is 65 years old. It wasn’t designed to host special education programs and persons with disabilities. But the new facility will have separate elementary, middle and high school classroom wings around an outdoor courtyard. A small gymnasium will round out the building, along with a common area, individual and group rooms and a maker space.

“It’s a little bit more durable and a little less flexible,” explained Charles Stiller, a project manager with Vancouver Public Schools. “New age school design has a lot more windows, a lot more glazing and a lot of operable walls or ways to flex spaces. This is very much just four-walled classrooms.”

The new school is being built on district-owned property that formerly held the John R. Rogers Elementary School. That building was demolished first, Stiller said.

Tapani Inc. is the general contractor for the project, which was designed by LSW Architects – a longtime partner of Vancouver Public Schools.

A ceremonial ground-breaking event took place in February. Crews have now wrapped up work on the building’s foundation. Ironworkers with Timberland Inc. recently began erecting the structural steel framework.

The new building will primarily feature brick masonry with metal panels for accent.

“We’re hoping to open after winter break next year, in January 2021,” Stiller said. “We’re supposed to be finished in December and take a couple of weeks to take care of any punch list stuff and get the move-in process completed.”

The one wild card, of course, is the pandemic.

“Even at this point even a two-week delay would move us back to Spring Break at the earliest and a month would probably push us all the way into the next (school) year,” Stiller said.

In part that’s because of the unique student population.

“It doesn’t mean construction would have had to take that whole time,” he said. “But this kind of student population you don’t move over a weekend. These kids, the teachers – they need time to figure out how they’re going to use the new space.”

For now, work is proceeding, Tapani superintendent Michael Walters said.

“In two months the structure will be up, the roof will be on, we’ll be roughed in and the slabs should be poured inside,” he said. “Then we’ll be starting to frame the walls.”

So far, the project has proceeded relatively smoothly, Stiller said.

“We got really lucky with where we’re at in the process, with site work and concrete,” he said. “We’ve had some plumbers as well, but small crews. If we were two months away from opening, we’d definitely have some issues.”

Walters agreed.

“Oh, definitely,” he said. “If we had an enclosed building it would definitely limit the amount of bodies I’d let on the site and what areas you can work in.”

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In Portland’s Central Eastside Industrial District, construction of a six-story mixed-use building is progressing quickly.

District Office will have 90,400 square feet – five stories of creative office space above ground-floor retail space. There will also be one level of below-grade parking. Work began in May 2018 with . Then Timberland Inc. carpentry crews flew the first cross-laminated timber panel into place a year later, and the building was topped out barely three months after that.

Beam Development and Urban Development + Partners are developing the project, which was designed by Hacker. The general contractor is Andersen Construction.

A pair of concrete building cores will house elevators and stairwells as well as mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems. Glulam beams and columns are being used, along with CLT floor panels manufactured by DR Johnson. A 3-inch topping slab on each floor will provide additional horizontal shear strength, while floor-to-ceiling glazing will let in generous amounts of natural light.

“The timber structure is fully up, the topping slabs are done, framing is up and going on all elevations two through the roof, and the roof starts going in today,” Andersen Construction project manager Katie Hoyt said late last month. “Fiberglass windows are done on the east elevation, they are a good portion of the way done on the south and they’ll be starting on the north side today, as well.”

The exterior will feature brick cladding, fiberglass windows and aluminum storefronts. The main entry will front Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Upon delivery, Hacker will occupy space on the sixth floor and part of the fifth; other tenants have not been named. Much of the building, at 525 S.E. MLK Jr. Blvd., will be shell space initially.

Power issues have complicated the project.

“Everywhere you look we’ve got live power lines,” Hoyt said. “And our temp power line for the job is coming across the street.”

There is a streetcar line on the east side of the project site, power lines on the north and south sides, and two buildings on the west side.

“When we’re done, our power into the building will go under Stark (Street); they’ve already done the excavation for that,” Hoyt said. “It will go into a switch vault and then into the building. So when we’re able to turn the live power on, then they can disconnect the temp power. But live power is predicated on having the electrical rooms done and signed off and lockable – all that good stuff.”

The project’s tower crane is set to be dismantled in November. Project completion is expected by the end of the year.

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Construction of District Office, a six-story, 90,400-square-foot mixed-use building on the rise at Southeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Stark Street, began in May 2018 with demolition of the former home of Portland Music Co. One year later, crews are installing cross-laminated timber elements.

The building will feature a structural framework of glulam columns and beams and CLT floor panels around a pair of concrete building cores. One level of below-grade parking is topped with a post-tensioned concrete deck, but then it’s all wood until rough-in.

“There was a lot of conversation early on about trying to do them at the same time as we do timber,” Andersen Construction project manager Katie Hoyt said. “But the cores require so much of (a) crane that you really have to dedicate the crane to them.”

Andersen Construction is building District Office for Beam Development and Urban Development + Partners. Hacker designed the building to hold five stories of creative office space above ground-floor retail space. The exterior will feature brick cladding, fiberglass windows and aluminum storefronts at the main entry fronting Southeast Martin Luther King Boulevard.

District Office is one of a growing number of mass-timber buildings in the Portland area. The structural component has continued to gain acceptance among both builders and, more importantly, the International Building Council. Its code now makes provision for mass-timber construction up to 18 stories.

One of the biggest advantages of mass-timber construction is the time saved via use of prefabricated beams, columns or panels – or all three together. In the case of District Office, DR Johnson of Riddle manufactured every single beam, column and CLT floor panel before a single piece arrived at the job site. This allowed truckloads of columns and beams to arrive on-site to be installed immediately by a small crew of carpenters from Timberland Inc. Then 42-foot-long CLT floor panels are flown into place with the tower crane.

“The whole building is fabricated, and a small part of it is here and the rest is in Riddle,” said Brad Nile, a project executive with Andersen Construction. “It’s pre-cut and ready to go.”

A three-inch concrete topping slab will add support on each floor once mass timber is in place. Gaps between CLT floor panels will facilitate other work.

“The intent is that all mechanical (systems), be it electrical or whatever, fit in those gaps to keep it clean,” Hoyt said. “It’s all open and accessible.”

This is the first mass-timber project Hoyt has managed. The biggest difference between a traditional concrete-and-steel-framed structure and a mass-timber one, she said, is the savings of time and manpower that come from prefabrication.

“Basically, it’s a whole, complete system that when it all goes and clicks together you’ve created a floor in a pretty quick time frame,” she said. “They fabricated it from the top down and put it into storage, and as they pull it out it comes out from the bottom up in order.”

Significant time was also spent modeling shipments three-dimensionally to ensure efficient delivery to the job site. Once on site, materials are lifted straight from the delivery truck to where they need to go.

“You have to strategically place materials on the truck so they come off in somewhat of an order,” Hoyt said.

The use of mass timber is only likely to grow, Nile said, but added that a maturation process is necessary.

“We need scale and efficiency and just the supply chain growing up to the point where it’s real,” he said. “It’s been a lot of work to get here. It’s all 3-D models, and every component is analyzed so you can do all this off-site fabrication very accurately. And it’s a fun way to build, but I think the supply chain needs to grow up a bit. It’s much more mature in Europe.”

Construction of District Office is expected to finish by the end of 2019.

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With the ongoing shortage of skilled labor showing little signs of abatement, contractors are eagerly seeking ways to increase efficiency. This is one reason why the use of panelized wood-framed wall systems and other methods of prefabrication are gaining popularity.

“There is a lot of automation and digitization of building information with BIM, so that’s a factor,” said Mike Steffen, director of innovation for Walsh Construction. “But the big factor that’s leading to its use now is the shortage of labor.”

It’s actually a double whammy – in the Pacific Northwest, at least, he added.

“There’s more work out there available for the contractors to do, and the labor pool is extremely stretched,” he said. “So they have to do more with less, and panelization allows them to attack projects, regardless of their size, with a smaller crew and be able to spread their labor out. To me, that is actually the biggest driver of the change right now.”

One of the advantages of prefabrication is the reduction in the amount of on-site work required. By using three-dimensional digital models based on engineering and design documents, virtually any part of a project can then be shared with trade partners; then those aspects where prefabrication makes financial and practical sense can be tackled.

“Really, it’s part of the Lean construction trend that’s been smoldering a little bit over the past almost decade at this point,” said Aaron Vogel, a project and building information modeling (BIM) manager for Bremik Construction. “Some components of that seem to be catching on more than others, but basically it’s making it more of an efficient manufacturing process instead of the less efficient method of building everything on-site.”

Vogel has helped guide a number of projects where Bremik has collaborated with trade partners in creating these models months before the first shovelful of dirt is moved.

“If we’re coordinating with trade partners on all the systems in the building months before anything shows up on-site, it allows them to prefabricate,” Vogel said. “We get everyone on board early on and partner with the subs and try to communicate early on that we view this as a benefit we think you should do.”

Some of the larger subcontractors Bremik has partnered with in this regard include Piper Mechanical and Timberland Inc. The latter firm is working with Bremik on the Magnolia II affordable housing project in Northeast Portland. There, the two companies worked up a digital framing package based on building plans using Autodesk Revit design software. This allowed Timberland to pre-cut every stick of lumber being used for the four-story building for nonprofit Innovative Housing Inc.

“We’re kind of taking things that normally aren’t part of construction industry and making it more like manufacturing process,” Vogel said. “We’re borrowing from the architectural and design and from animation, and now there’s a whole push toward improving the visibility of the project, so there’s a whole tidal wave of software geared toward the contractor.”

It’s not a rigid process. There are so many variables in each project that creativity is not only allowed; it’s required.

“In general it’s been an asset,” Vogel said. “It’s been something that to a certain extent has grown out of the architects’ modeling. But it would be nice if we can use it to move toward a more collaborative process.”

Prefabricated wall panels are one of the easier pieces of a building to build off-site. They come in many forms too. From simple interior walls consisting only of bare studs to exterior panels that come with weather barriers, insulation and even utility fixtures, the variations are nearly endless.

Computer-aided design and manufacturing have also helped ensure a much higher level of accuracy in crafting prefabricated components.

Such advantages of prefabrication may influence decisions for affordable housing projects. The owner requirements for projects of this type typically differ significantly from those for market-rate projects, in part because of the former’s long-term approach.

“With the client niche we serve, especially in the affordable housing world, costs have been going up dramatically,” Steffen said.

From a historic annual rate of inflation of roughly 3 to 4 percent, the current rate of cost escalation regionally is at least double that amount.

In response, Steffen led a team of Walsh executives in crafting a white paper that examined a host of different ways of approaching design, preconstruction and construction in an attempt to reduce costs and boost efficiencies. Known as Cost Efficient Design and Construction (CEDC), this effort is simply a matter of common sense, Steffen said. CEDC includes things like standardizing the layout of residential units, reducing their width (and by extension, the building envelope), avoiding excessive glazing, staying away from cantilevers and structural steel, and putting plumbing in back-to-back walls.

Altogether, such actions can slash roughly 10 to 20 percent from a project’s cost, Steffen said.

“Our premise is if you follow these ideas you will very likely reduce costs,” he said.

Such strategies can be used with prefabricated wall panels. There are many examples under construction in Portland, including the Nesika Illahee affordable housing project being built by LMC Construction in the Cully neighborhood.

The three-story wood-framed building designed by Carleton Hart Architecture will have 59 residential units. Prefabricated panels manufactured by Pacific Wall Systems are being used. This has reduced the number of carpenters on-site to fewer than 10.

“If I had 20 guys out here they’d just be getting in each other’s way,” LMC superintendent Tim Williams said. “I think we have more superintendents (on-site) than we do laborers and carpenters.”

Meanwhile, efficiency also is increasing via use of cross-laminated timber panels in floor and ceiling installations for projects such as Albina Yard, an office building in Northeast Portland. Geoff Sosebee of Lever Architecture helped design it.

“The panels only require a crew of four, including a crane operator, and it goes up very, very quickly,” he told the audience last month during a Portland Design Week event focused on prefabrication. “But we learned that we needed team-wide communication with the contractor, the manufacturer, architects, engineers, fabricators – everyone involved.”

Lessons were learned along the way, Sosebee added. But the process that was developed in ad hoc fashion for Albina Yard has since been used in other projects.

“We modeled every bolt and every screw, and in the end we wanted this thing to go together like an Erector Set,” he said. “An entire floor would be set in three to four hours during construction, but it wasn’t all easy.”

Challenges abound for the building industries these days. However, prefabrication and similar strategies are attracting attention, and may help firms overcome those hurdles.

“The industry has been lazy and has not been willing to do the right thing, which is to do the intensive coordination early and have this stuff figured out on paper or with a virtual model,” Steffen said. “But the industry is going more and more that way, and the prefabrication can help.”

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