Four Oregon projects that incorporated public art have received from Americans for the Arts.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, an advocate for the arts and arts education, compiled a list of 31 outstanding public art projects constructed in 2014. Three were for the city of Portland: Fire Station 21, a nature playground at Westmoreland Park and improvements to Southeast Division Street. A memorial at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem also was recognized.

The projects are included in the Public Art Network Year in Review database, which annually recognizes compelling public art in the U.S. and Canada.

This year’s jury-selected projects were announced last week during an Americans for the Arts’ convention in Chicago. The 2015 Public Arts Network Year in Review jury included an Oregon official – Peggy Kendellen, public art manager for Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council.

Pacific Northwest artist David Franklin was honored for an installation that invokes water ripples on the west façade of Fire Station 21 in Southeast Portland. The building was designed by Whelton Architecture in collaboration with architect David P. Suttle and constructed by Skanska USA Building.

A Portland Bureau of Transportation streetscape improvement project was recognized for including eight sculptures of people by Portland artists Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis. They were installed along Division Street between 11th and 36th avenues.

Americans for the Arts recognized the Portland Parks & Recreation effort to replace the Westmoreland Park playground with a nature play area designed by Portland-based landscape architecture firm GreenWorks in collaboration with artist Adam Kuby.

Seattle-based art and architecture firm Lead Pencil Studio was honored for designing a memorial that holds the 3,456 cremated remains of patients who died at the Oregon State Hospital and were never claimed by family members.

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Skanska USA Building is on target for a November completion of Fire Station 21, a new 2-story fire and life safety facility being built on the eastern bank of the Willamette River. Construction crews are installing siding and roofing on the building’s exterior, while plumbers and drywall crews are busy inside. The $7.8 million project was designed by Whelton Architecture in collaboration with architect David P. Suttle.

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A new Fire Station 21 is being built in Portland to withstand a major earthquake, and serve as a fire and life safety facility along the Willamette River. Construction of such a building on a sloped surface extending over the river comes with challenges, said David Dwyer, project manager for Skanska USA Building – the contractor for the $7.8 million project.

The two-story structure will replace a one-story one on virtually the same footprint, Dwyer said.

“It’s not actually native soil because that area is all fill,” he said. “We’ve had to stabilize all the soil.”

Soil stabilization took about six months, starting in October after the former fire station was demolished, Dwyer said. Deep steel pilings were drilled 80 to 100 feet into bedrock, and soil was filled with grout.

“That’s why all the foundation work has taken so long,” he said. “It’s a challenging way to build. We had to get down there deep enough so that the soil was compacted so it doesn’t liquefy in an earthquake.”

The grout had to be pumped at a well-regulated pressure to accommodate different soils beneath the surface, Dwyer said.

On top of all the subsurface work, Skanska is finishing the concrete footing that will support the steel structure. At least half of the 8,000-square-foot building will be supported by 3-foot-wide, 30-foot-long beams that cantilever over the bank, Dwyer said.

The first floor will be built a couple of feet above the 100-year flood zone level; anything lower will be certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as water-resistant, he said.

“The next challenge is building the building at a slope,” Dwyer said. “Obviously, we can’t drop materials or build a scaffolding system west of the work area.”

Crews are designing a work platform that will be cantilevered from underneath the building, allowing them to build while preventing spills, he said.

Building the station required local, state and federal approvals, which were granted faster because the dock had been approved for fire station use in 2001, said Connie Johnson, project manager for the city’s Bureau of Internal Business Services.

“One thing that’s compelling is that this location is so good,” she said. “If we had tried to find another location on the river, it would have taken a year to acquire the property and at least another six months to get all the permitting. It was really a good choice.”

A boathouse already constructed by Oregon Iron Works will house two boats. A third will be added later, Johnson said.

The building is designed to accommodate fire and life safety activities in a confined space, said Aaron Whelton, principal of Whelton Architecture; he collaborated with local architect David P. Suttle on the project.

Site factors included seismic issues, river fluctuations, proximity to Interstate 5 and the Hawthorne Bridge, and the city’s desire to keep the greenway pristine and free of additional buildings, Whelton said.

“It’s a huge responsibility,” he said. “There isn’t going to be a building like this in such a prominent location on the river anywhere.”

Efforts were made to reduce the amount of the building’s footprint on the ground; at least 50 percent of the building will be cantilevered over the bank, Whelton said. The apparatus bay, which will hold an all-terrain vehicle and a small fire engine, will be the only portion of the building that completely touches the ground, he said.

The design also creates a living space in a building that will be visible from six different vantage points, including the Hawthorne Bridge and the river, Whelton said.

“Typically, a fire station has a clear front and back,” he said. “We don’t have that kind of luxury. Every portion is visible from some vantage point.”

Bunk rooms will be as far away from I-5 as possible to reduce noise. An exterior deck will be tucked away so firefighters are not always on display. Four firefighters will live at the station, which will have five rooms, according to the city.

A utility courtyard was developed for the building’s air conditioning equipment, which typically would be placed on the roof, Whelton said. The courtyard, which will house the HVAC equipment, the building’s transformer and trash, will be completed tucked away, he said.

“We did a very good job solving those unique challenges,” he said.

The most prominent feature will be artwork called “The Ripple Wall,” by Seattle artist David Franklin. It will be fabricated in Seattle and assembled in Portland, and include a series of vertical aluminum fins on the west side covering a second-floor catwalk around the building. Each fin will have a different profile, creating a unique rippling effect visible from the bridge and the river, Whelton said.

“I think that’s an amazing opportunity to engage the public with art,” he said.

The public also will be able to engage with the space in a community room, which will have views of the river and be open for the public to reserve, he said.

Project construction is scheduled to wrap up in November.

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A five-month search by the city of Portland for a firm to design Fire Station 21 appears to be over. The city last week said it intends to negotiate a contract with Whelton Architecture to handle architecture and engineering for the project.

This is the second contract award for Whelton to design Fire Station 21. The city’s procurement services department in the Office of Management and Finance admits that the facilities department, which managed the first award, made some mistakes. The procurement services department says it addressed the errors by restarting the evaluation process. However, a competing firm’s owner, who brought to light the problems with the first award, says he still is concerned.

Fire Station 21 consulting team

Whelton Architecture will negotiate a contract for the design of Fire Station 21. Its proposed contract amount for the project was $607,075. The architecture team will be Aaron Whelton of Whelton Architecture, and architect David Suttle. The consulting team includes:
• TCA Architecture & Planning, consulting architecture
• KPFF, structural and civil engineering
• Interface Engineering: mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering, and lighting design
• Flowing Solutions, waterfront planning and permitting
• Green Building Services, LEED project management, energy modeling and building analysis, and commissioning
• 2.ink Studio, landscape architecture
• JMB Consulting Group, cost estimation
• Evergreen Engineering, code analysis

“It wasn’t a transparent process,” Carleton Hart Architecture‘s William Hart said.

In April, 10 architecture firms submitted proposals to design a new fire station to replace an aging building near the Hawthorne Bridge. The existing station is the last in Portland not seismically upgraded – when a bond was passed to upgrade all city stations, Fire Station 21 was out of commission. It was brought online recently to replace a station in a different location that will be taken out of commission because of nearby Portland-Milwaukie light-rail construction nearby.

The Office of Management and Finance’s facilities department, which managed the request for proposals process, decided that of the 10 firms that applied, those with the four highest scores would qualify for oral interviews. The winner would then be selected based on the results of the oral interviews.

In a protest letter to the city, Hart wrote that the facilities department did not follow that outlined RFP process. The overall scores used to calculate the winning firm consisted of scores from the evaluation of written proposals and from the oral interviews. But not all firms were asked the same questions, according to Hart, which caused led some firms to score higher than others.

Hart pointed out that a representative of the city’s facilities department told firms during a mandatory pre-application conference that short-listed firms would “start from zero” during the interview process. According to Hart’s calculations, if the city had indeed “started from zero” and excluded the issues not discussed in their oral interviews, Carleton Hart would have won the contract.

Procurement Supervisor Barb Gibson called the problem a “process issue.”

“The Chief Procurement Officer agreed … that Carleton Hart had a point that there was a ‘process problem,’ ” Gibson said.

So the city rescinded Whelton’s award from the original RFP round, and the process was moved from the facilities department to the procurement services department. In a June 15 interview with the Daily Journal of Commerce, OMF management analyst Abby Coppick said that the city would re-interview the shortlisted firms.

On July 17, Gibson told the 91��Ƶ that the city would return to evaluations of the original 10 written proposals and convene an entirely new evaluation committee. It was the first time in memory that the clock had been turned back so far on the process, Gibson said in that interview.

“As we started working, it became clear that we needed to back it up one more step,” Gibson said. “We really wanted it to be a clean process.”

The new committee evaluated the 10 written proposals, and Whelton Architecture came out on top. On Aug. 12, the city once again issued a notice that Whelton Architecture would get the contract.

Aaron Whelton, owner of the winning architecture firm, said he believes procurement services took the right action. “I think it was the right decision to take a step back,” Whelton said. “By going back in the process, it strengthens the decision and removes it from potential scrutiny.”

But Hart doesn’t believe the time for scrutiny has passed. He said his main question at this point is why the city didn’t call firms back in for oral interviews for the second process.

“The interviews were important the first time around; I don’t see why they were excluded this time,” Hart said. “Usually things are more transparent. Given as much scrutiny that this (process) has had, it would seem that (the city) would have at least had oral interviews.”

Gibson said her office had the option of conducting oral interviews in the second process, but decided that doing so was unlikely to change the outcome because of the disparity in points between the top two firms.

In the first round, the top two candidates were separated by a distance of 10 points out of 500; in the second round, the distance was 13 points out of 600. Both of those represent a margin of about 2 percent.

“A lot of times, we use the orals when there’s just one or two points between. But when there’s a larger gap it’s not normal that we go to (interviews),” Gibson said.

Hart did not submit a protest letter after Whelton was awarded the contract in the second round. Even if the process had gone to oral interviews in the second round, his firm would not have made the cut. In the second round, Whelton Architecture was a front-runner with 502 points, and Carleton Hart had the second lowest score at 428. The firms received the same score when their written proposals were scored in the first round – and both were in third place.

The five-member committee for the first process and the six-member committee for the second process both included representatives from the city fire bureau and from the committee that oversees the bond that will pay for construction. Community members, one city staffer and one Multnomah County staffer also participated.

The scores were created by the evaluation committees assigning numerical values to subjective areas, like “project approach and understanding” and “proposer’s capabilities.”

Portland Fire & Rescue’s new Deputy Chief of Logistics Marco Benetti was a member of the committee for the second process. He said it was “pretty straightforward.”

“Everyone has their own subjectivity about how their scores are,” Benetti said. “But (the scores) all seemed to come out pretty close among all the scoring people.

“I’m looking forward to the project going forward,” he added.

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The city of Portland’s procurement services has issued an intent to award notice for a contract for the design of Fire Station 21 to Whelton Architecture — for the second time.

Whelton Architecture’s Aaron Whelton won the contract initially in May, but that award was revoked after Carleton Hart Architecture filed a protest. Abby Coppock, management analyst for the city’s Office of Management and Finance, said in June that the city had not correctly followed the procurement process for the project.

William Hart, who filed the protest letter for Carleton Hart, wrote in that letter that he believed his firm would have been awarded the contract if the process had been followed correctly.

The city initially said it would turn back the clock to the interview phase and correct the process from that point by re-interviewing the shortlisted firms, but it later decided to turn the clock back even further to convene a new evaluation committee to look at all 10 initially submitted proposals.

The city issued the new intent to award — this time a “notice of intent to negotiate and award contract” to Whelton on Friday after 5 p.m.

Protests of the current award must be filed by this Friday, Aug. 19. Whelton has declined to comment until the protest period is over. Hart said he had no comment and that he had not yet had the chance to review the scores for the second selection process.

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The city of Portland wants to find an architect to design a new Fire Station 21 to replace an aging facility near the Hawthorne Bridge. In May the city was on its way, and issued an intent to award a $700,000 architecture contract to up-and-coming local firm Whelton Architecture.

Less than a month later, the award was rescinded in response to a letter of protest submitted by one of the four firms shortlisted for the project. The protest, filed by Carleton Hart Architecture, focused on concerns about the solicitation process used to select the firm that won the final contract.

The city took a step back in the evaluation process, and said that the four shortlisted firms would be brought in to re-interview. Now chief procurement services manager Barbara Gibson says the city is taking yet another step back, replacing the evaluation committee altogether and re-considering all 10 of the proposals initially submitted in response to the project’s RFP in April.

The situation with Fire Station 21 is part of a trend, albeit an extreme example, Gibson said. In the past two years, the city’s procurement services staff has seen firms in the architecture, engineering and construction industries file more protests than they did in better economic times.

“Over the last year or two we have seen more protests, mainly in construction proposals,” Gibson said. “Because of the economy, people have chosen to do that.”

“There hasn’t been a case like (Fire Station 21) for a long time,” said Patti Mertz, a marketing and business development consultant for architecture firms. Mertz said that in better economic times, firms might be more likely to walk away from an RFP process they think is unfair because they have other jobs opportunities.

“You can move ever-forward when the phone keeps ringing,” Mertz said. “A few years ago, firms didn’t know if they needed a marketing person because they had so much work. Now, they’re fighting over every RFP that shows up.”

Gibson said dealing with appeals does take up a good chunk of time—when a protest is filed, the solicitation process is essentially put on hold until the issue is resolved. However, though city departments and bureaus that deal with procurement have faced staff cutbacks in recent years, Gibson won’t complain about the workload.

“It really doesn’t matter how much time it takes,” Gibson said. “It matters that the protest is reviewed. We take them very seriously.”

The situation with Fire Station 21 has been a particularly serious situation for the city. After interviewing the project’s shortlisted firms, the evaluation committee named the winning firm as Whelton Architecture, a small firm that also recently won a design competition for a firefighter’s memorial, which will be located adjacent to the new station.

On May 24, William Hart, a principal at Carleton Hart Architecture, sent a letter of protest questioning the process and calculations that led to the award for Fire Station 21.

During a pre-proposal meeting for the project, city staff told firms that once a short list had been selected for the project, the shortlisted firms would “start from zero” at the interview phase. The staff said that points assigned during the proposal phase were to be kept separate from interview considerations.

In his protest, Hart alleged that documents from the selection process showed proposal-phase scores relating to diversity and cost were carried through to the interview phase and adjusted for some firms. Hart said the evaluation committee asked no questions about diversity and cost during the Carleton Hart interview and the issues were not discussed.

Gibson said the “starting from zero” answer at the pre-application meeting was not consistent with the process laid out in the RFP, which states that points will carry over from proposal to interview phases.

To clear up the process, Gibson said that the process will be backtracked all the way to the initial evaluation process. The seats on the five-member evaluation committee will be filled with all new members.

“We try really hard to be clean and fair,” Gibson said. “To bring in a new evaluation committee and (re-evaluate) starting with the written proposals, seemed cleaner.”

The new committee will independently score written proposals. If there is no single frontrunner after the proposals are scored, the committee will bring in a short list of candidates for interviews.

Gibson said this is the first time she’s seen the city go so far back to reappoint an evaluation committee.

The RFP process is subjective and different evaluators will quantify firms’ qualifications in different ways. In the case of Fire Station 21, the issues with fairness in the proposal process went beyond subjectivity, however.

“I really admire the architect that steps up,” Mertz said. “It’s a public agency run by tax dollars. It should be fair.”

William Hart and Whelton Architecture’s Aaron Whelton both declined to comment for this story.

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The city of Portland will have to take a few steps back on a project to rebuild Fire Station 21 near the Hawthorne Bridge on the east bank of the Willamette River.

After a competitive proposal process, the city issued an intent to award a $700,00 design contract to Whelton Architecture, one of four architecture firms short-listed for the project. On Tuesday, the city issued a notice that it was rescinding that award and stepping back in the process to once again conduct interviews with the short-listed candidates.

That notice was in response to a letter of protest sent by William Hart, a principal at Carleton Hart Architecture. Carleton Hart was among the shortlisted architecture firms. In his letter, Hart said the selection process did not follow the one outlined in the city’s request for proposals.

In his letter, Hart pointed out that the city had expressed in the RFP and pre-proposal meeting that once a short list had been selected, those firms would “start from zero” at the interview phase. Points given during the proposal phase were to be kept separate from interview considerations. However, documents from the selection process showed that proposal-phase scores relating to diversity and cost were carried through to the interview phase and adjusted for some firms, though those issues were not even discussed in Carleton Hart’s interview.

If the math were re-calculated to fit the correct process, Hart believed his firm would have been awarded the contract.

The city acknowledged its mistake by rescinding the award.

“We’re going back to where (the process) deviated from the process outlined in the RFP,” said Abby Coppock, management analyst for the city’s Office and Management and Finance.

Hart declined to comment for this story.

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Whelton Architecture was selected this week to design the city’s newest fire station. The city of Portland issued an intent to award a nearly $700,000 contract to Whelton after conducting interviews with shortlisted candidates Monday. Ten firms responded to a request for qualifications for the project.

Fire Station 21 will replace an existing building on a prominent waterfront site near the Hawthorne Bridge and will be the Portland Fire and Rescue water rescue hub. The project will include the addition of a 10,000-square-foot boathouse. Whelton had previously been selected to design the nearby Firefighters Memorial after winning a contest last year.

“It’s really an amazing site and an amazing opportunity to craft something for the city,” said Aaron Whelton of Whelton Architecture. “It’s unique in its context. I don’t think there are any other buildings nearly as prominent along the east bank.”

The design team will include structural engineers KPFF Consulting Engineers, mechanical electrical and plumbing engineers Interface Engineering, and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design consultants Green Building Services. Seattle-based TCA Architects will co-design the project, having years of experience designing fire stations, Whelton said.

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Related

» Portland Firefighters Memorial seeking spot on historic register

A scaled-down version of the winning design by Aaron Whelton of Whelton Architecture will be used for a new firefighters’ memorial along the Willamette River.

His original design for the Portland Fallen Firefighters Memorial called for a sweeping open space along the Eastbank Esplanade, with lanterns to represent each fallen firefighter. But the area it covered was too large, and adding a new lantern for any new death could be expensive for the city and the fire department.

“The new scheme is much smaller but retains the same poetic value as the original,” Whelton said. “Now it’s about 6,000 to 7,000 square feet. And instead of adding new lanterns, the lantern lighting patterns will be altered monthly to reflect the historical number of firefighters who died during that month.”

Willow trees planted at the site by a previous fire chief will be preserved. A historic fire bell that currently resides at Portland Firefighters Park will be moved to the east bank and housed in a stone frame with water and light features. In addition, a fire boat named for David Campbell will be permanently moored at the site.

Fundraising for the $2.4 million project is under way. For more information, visit .

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