I think this came out STUNNING!
Port of Portland design driven by efficiency
POSTED: Friday, April 2, 2010 at 01:39 PM PT
BY: Justin Carinci
Project: Port of Portland Headquarters, or HQP2 - a 10-story building with seven floors of parking and three office floors.
Location: Portland International Airport
Size: 205,000 square feet of offices and 3,500 parking spaces, including 500 for rental cars
Total cost: $241 million, including $156 million for the garage and $85 million for the offices
Construction cost: $194 million
Architect: Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects
Engineers: KPFF (structural), PAE (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) and HNTB (civil)
General Contractor: Hoffman Construction
Project management: Inici Group
The Port of Portland headquarters building offers views, from the West Hills to the Cascade Mountains to the bluffs above the Columbia River, otherwise available only from a tower or an airplane.
When Port employees move into their new headquarters later this month, they’ll overlook the air and river traffic at the heart of their business. But the open layout of the $241 million building offers more than just sweeping views, said Bill Wyatt, executive director of the port. It also speeds decision-making time.
Information technology employees, who moved into the building early, told Wyatt how much quicker it is to make decisions. “This would have been four e-mails and seven meetings later,” he said.
“Now we can turn around and say ‘What do you think about this issue?’ and it’s done.”
The openness extends to the executive offices, or it would if there were any. Wyatt, like the rest of the 478-person staff, has a desk at a low-walled cubicle.
“We serve volatile, changing businesses,” Wyatt said. “We need to react quicker than the typical public agency.”
That efficiency drove the building’s design, said Eugene Sandoval, a partner at Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects in charge of design for the project. Aerodynamic elements suggest the hull of a boat or the wing of a plane.
“This is the first time the maritime and aviation part of the port are going to be housed in the same office,” Sandoval said. “It brought forth the ties they had together.
“They’re basically in the same business, whether it’s flying or shipping,” he said. “It’s all about connecting ports by air or water.”
The water theme is especially evident approaching the first-floor lobby, said Derrick Beneville with general contractor Hoffman Construction. There, cobblestones that once served as ballast weights line the walkway.
Overlapping glass panels on the sloping facade suggest the bow of a ship. Inside, a glass sculpture and sea-shelled terrazzo add to the ocean environment.
There are even waves in the basins of the Living Machine, which can treat more than 2,500 gallons of the building’s sewage per day. Water from toilets passes through a settling tank before cycling through eight open-air planters inside and outside the building.
Tidal motions introduce oxygen to speed up the treatment process occurring below vegetation and gravel. After a dose of ultraviolet light, the water is reused to flush toilets and urinals. As with other green features in the building, there’s no effort to hide the Living Machine. It looks like a series of planter boxes.
The moving sidewalk leading from the airport to the headquarters building looks like any other - except that it’s the first in the United States to feature motion sensors so that it turns off when no one’s around.
Heating and cooling come from 200 closed-loop, ground-source geothermal wells drilled 300 feet deep. Monitors automatically adjust blinds and dim overhead lights.
Radiant ceiling panels and zoned temperature controls account for heat gain that varies with the sun’s position, Beneville said. “It concentrates energy based on where people work.
“The south area can have cooling while another area has heat.”
The project, which broke ground in 2007, has required more than 1 million construction hours, 20 percent of those logged by apprentices.
Port officials set a goal of awarding 9 percent of the $191 million construction budget to minority, women and small business firms. Outreach, creative structuring of bid packages and an effort to broaden subcontractor skills led to nearly 24 percent of the project budget being awarded to those firms. The success is apparent on a tour of the site, said Rhonnda Parsons Edmiston, the port’s small business development program manager.
“It’s fun to walk through the project,” Edmiston said. “I could walk through and see the diversity.”
http://djcoregon.com/news/2010/04/02...by-efficiency/