About seven years ago, the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), the oldest art college in Portland, Ore., was evaluating its master plan with an eye toward expanding and upgrading its campus facilities to match its enrollment and endowment growth goals.
A board member brought to the attention of the college a nearby 134,000-sf building that had once served as the city’s original post office (it opened in 1919), and for the past two decades had been used as office space for federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The building was on the government’s disposal list and, according to Gus Baum, PNCA’s senior director of planning, was available “gratis” as long as it was used 100% for education.
Next February, that building is scheduled to reopen as the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design and become the college’s new hub, into which it has consolidated several of its other facilities around town. Over the four years of its $32 million redevelopment, the school, its architect (Allied Works Architecture), and development consultant (Gerding Edlen) had to overcome a number of design, logistical, and financial challenges.
This project’s architect, Allied Works Architecture, carved out new areas for exhibitions, productions, and classrooms, including the facility’s Black Box Theater, pictured here. Rendering courtesy Allied Works Architecture
For one thing, it took ICE a while to find new offices and vacate the premises. And the building’s configuration posed some unique design issues. Its north end was an open warehouse with no circulation, while the south end was a six-story tower. Baum says that a light well was removed from the roof of the warehouse to recreate a 5,000-sf skylight that illuminated the center of the building and created an atrium space.
The distance between the first and second floors of this building is about 24 feet, so the Building Team introduced a mezzanine that added 11,000 sf of usable workspace. The team also added design flourishes, like a cable system suspended from the ceiling.
Allied Works’ design highlights new areas for public programs and arts education, with spaces for exhibitions, lectures, and events in addition to classrooms, production facilities, an elegant library, and innovation studio and incubator called Media Tech.
This project’s greatest challenge may have been the building’s historic landmark status, which made such things as replacing door hardware for ADA compliance tougher. That status also posed seismic upgrade limitations that the Building Team resolved by installing a Viscous Dampening System, a bracing apparatus built into the walls that dissipates energy and allows the building to shift a bit in the event of a seismic event.
The building’s historic status made financing this project more complicated, says Jill Sherman, a vice president and partner at Gerding Edlen. Her firm, she explains, was hired specifically for its expertise in helping the college get through the rigorous approval process to qualify for New Market and Historic tax credits.
“We specialize in public-private partnerships, and this turned out to be one of the more complex because of the number of players involved,” she says.
Related Stories
| Oct 19, 2014
White House Visitor Center reopens in Washington, D.C.
Designed by SmithGroupJJR and Gallagher & Associates, renovated center shows public its unique role as office, stage, museum, park, and home.
| Oct 16, 2014
Perkins+Will white paper examines alternatives to flame retardant building materials
The white paper includes a list of 193 flame retardants, including 29 discovered in building and household products, 50 found in the indoor environment, and 33 in human blood, milk, and tissues.
| Oct 15, 2014
Harvard launches ‘design-centric’ center for green buildings and cities
The impetus behind Harvard's Center for Green Buildings and Cities is what the design school’s dean, Mohsen Mostafavi, describes as a “rapidly urbanizing global economy,” in which cities are building new structures “on a massive scale.”
| Oct 14, 2014
Proven 6-step approach to treating historic windows
This course provides step-by-step prescriptive advice to architects, engineers, and contractors on when it makes sense to repair or rehabilitate existing windows, and when they should advise their building owner clients to consider replacement.
| Oct 12, 2014
AIA 2030 commitment: Five years on, are we any closer to net-zero?
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the American Institute of Architects’ effort to have architecture firms voluntarily pledge net-zero energy design for all their buildings by 2030.
| Oct 9, 2014
Beyond the bench: Meet the modern laboratory facility
Like office workers escaping from the perceived confines of cubicles, today’s scientists have been freed from the trappings of the typical lab bench, writes Perkins+Will's Bill Harris.
| Oct 6, 2014
Frank Gehry's $100 million Eisenhower Memorial gets preliminary approval
After a rejection earlier in the year, Frank Gehry has gotten some good news: his revised design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial has received approval from the National Capital Planning Commission.
| Oct 2, 2014
Budget busters: Report details 24 of the world's most obscenely over-budget construction projects
Montreal's Olympic Stadium and the Sydney Opera House are among the landmark projects to bust their budgets, according to a new interactive graph by Podio.
| Sep 24, 2014
Architecture billings see continued strength, led by institutional sector
On the heels of recording its strongest pace of growth since 2007, there continues to be an increasing level of demand for design services signaled in the latest Architecture Billings Index.
| Sep 22, 2014
4 keys to effective post-occupancy evaluations
Perkins+Will's Janice Barnes covers the four steps that designers should take to create POEs that provide design direction and measure design effectiveness.
