Some big changes in store for Meier & Frank depot building
$20 million renovation will convert warehouse into offices and 240 parking spaces
Daily Journal of Commerce
POSTED: 06:00 AM PDT Wednesday, May 21, 2008
BY SAM BENNETT
Construction is set to begin this summer on the $20 million renovation of the Meier & Frank Delivery Depot building in the Pearl District.
The renovation, designed by GBD Architects, will transform 160,000 square feet of warehouse space into Class A office space and 240 parking spaces. In addition, the renovated building will have a 25,000-square-foot penthouse.
Meier & Frank owned and operated the building, which takes up a full block at Northwest 14th Avenue and Northwest Everett Street, until the early 1980s. The Oregon Historical Society used it as a warehouse until about 1998.
Keith Skille of GBD Architects, project manager for the renovation, said the building had been considered for retail space and even as a hotel in the last few years. But due to a lack of funding and other reasons, those plans didn’t materialize. The Telco Hotel renovation project got under way in 1999, but was quickly scrapped because of insufficient finances.
“It took a while to find the right mix,” he said. The developer for the new project is Gerding Edlen Development Co.
The 81-year-old building is on the National Register of Historic Places and was designed by Sutton & Whitney, the firm that designed the Masonic Temple on Portland’s Park Blocks.
The building was used to store home furnishings and other items for sale at Meier & Frank. Customers at the retail chain would select the furnishings and they would be delivered from the depot building, Skille said.
Skille said the building was designed in the “half-modernist” style, with elements of late 1920s modernism and Beaux Arts.
“It has a stripped-down classical sort of architecture that has a clean and simple exterior,” he said. The steel beams on the interior are encased in concrete.
The renovation will include a seismic retrofit. New elevators are needed because the original freight elevator is not operable.
Some 12,000 square feet of retail space is planned at the base of the building, on the 14th Avenue side. About 240 parking spaces will occupy the ground floor and the entire second floor.
The building, which will get new windows, will lend itself well to an open floor plan, Skille said. “The amount of daylight you get around the perimeter is just incredible,” he said.
The penthouse will be a wood-frame structure, in sharp contrast with the concrete building it sits atop. Skille said the penthouse will incorporate Glu-Lam beams.
The project, which will have exposed ceilings, solar panels atop the penthouse and an under-floor air distribution system for better thermal comfort, is designed to achieve LEED platinum certification.
The design also calls for a 165,000-gallon water storage cistern that will harvest 80 percent of storm water. Other LEED features will be bicycle storage and locker rooms; new wood products that are FSC certified; low VOC-emitting paints, carpets, adhesives and sealants; and composite wood products.
The project team is: Skanska USA Building, general contractor; KPFF, structural engineer; Glumac, plumbing, mechanical, electrical; Lango Hanson, landscape architecture; HHPR, civil engineering; and the historical consultant is Heritage Consulting.
http://www.djcoregon.com/articleDetail.h...-million-renovation--will-convert-wareho
Prev
Linear Mode
