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Designing for dollars with the aerial tram
Evaluating the cost vs. the value of the international design competition
Sunday, February 18, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
The aerial tram is just a few metal panels away from being 100 percent complete.
An exhibition by the tram's designer, Sarah Graham is now on view at the American Institute of Architects.
It's a good time to ask: Was the international design competition to design the tram a good idea?
As with all things aerial tram, opinions abound. So let's narrow the discussion to a couple of participants who had the most money and reputation on the line and two architects and an engineer, one inside the process, one out and one in between.
Full disclosure: I argued strenuously for a tram design competition in several articles during the early tram planning process. Barge builder Jay Zidell, the owner of 33 acres next door to where the tram now lands, liked the idea, anteing up $50,000 to get the contest going. The city, Oregon Health & Science University and developer Homer Williams followed suit.
Ultimately, Sarah Graham of the Swiss/American firm Angelil/Graham/Pfenninger/Scholl bested three finalists: UN Studio of the Netherlands, SHoP from New York and Guy Nordenson, one of the world's foremost engineers.
Graham captured the imagination of the jury and the public with her concept of "light infrastructure" -- minimalist structures and bubble-shaped cars -- and a wider set of connections between OHSU, the river and the long-abused neighborhood in between.
The rest, of course, is tortured history. The original $15.5 million budget -- based on a simple ski-lift-style tram anchored into Marquam Hill's basalt -- proved way too low for the actual engineering problem at hand: anchoring the tram's 1 million pounds of cars and cables on a freestanding 80-foot tower, a feat of engineering never before accomplished.
Add soaring steel prices for the towers, a falling dollar to pay the Swiss tram equipment manufacturer and a construction contract that left the city shouldering all the risk for cost overruns.
Presto, final cost: $57 million.
But how much of the final price was really the design?
Let's take the easy parts first.
An off-the-shelf tram car could have cost approximately $500,000. Graham's bubble-shaped car -- which required bringing metalsmiths out of retirement to hand-hammer the curves -- cost $1.4 million.
An off-the-shelf version of the 175-foot intermediate tower next to I-5 -- a so-called "lattice tower" like those for high-voltage power lines -- would have cost $720,000. Graham's sleek, steel-plate tower cost $8.5 million.
All that Graham added to the lower tower was the aluminum-mesh enclosure -- minimal cost at best.
Total design premium so far: about $8.68 million.
The upper station at OHSU is where the opinions about the value added vary -- wildly.
OHSU's Steve Stadum, who watched his institution's contribution climb from $10 million to more than $40 million, thinks tighter city contracts and a "design/build" process (in which the architect works for the contractor) could have built Graham's design for $35 million. Matt Brown, the city's original project manager who oversaw the earliest stages of the design, says the tram's overall cost could have been cut in half with all off-the-shelf systems by Swiss ski-lift company Doppelmayr.
"But with every vote, the City Council confirmed it wanted more than that," he says.
When the costs for the tower began soaring, the city hired Art Johnson of KPFF Consulting Engineers, a lead engineer on major Portland building projects for more than 30 years, to review the design. Graham's scheme featured one concrete elevator shaft plus four splayed, steel-plate columns. Johnson proposed the upper tower to sit atop two concrete pillars -- estimated savings $7 million.
But Graham drove a hard bargain, wanting payment for any redesign and, at times, even threatening to resign.
"The whole idea was that we were buying a designer, not a design," says Stadum of OHSU. "She was supposed to be flexible. She was not."
Graham's AIA exhibition testifies to that resolve.
Graham's original competition proposal would have built the towers out of high-tech steel-and-wood laminates. Brown and others working with Graham believe she held fast to that idea way too long. Graham counters that her interest throughout was to keep the promise of a minimalist tram.
The AIA show features dozens of models of potential tram structures Graham and her team studied. But the full sets of plans also on view show what happened after she and her team landed on their choice. From concept to full construction drawings to the final "value engineering" to cut every conceivable cost, little about the design changed -- because little could.
"This is the smallest, lightest structure we could possibly do," she says. "There isn't one more stick than there needed to be."
Greg Baldwin, a longtime Portland architect and urban designer who sat on the competition selection committee, thinks the competition gave the project a profile that kept it from getting "nickeled and dimed."
"I think the competition was a good idea, even more than I did in the beginning," he says. "Quality was achieved, which isn't easy in the current construction environment."
"It was exactly the kind of project for a competition," according to architect Don Stastny, who has run dozens design competitions, from the Disney Concert Hall to the American Embassy in Berlin to the current contest between Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava and others to design what is to be San Francisco's tallest building.
Stastny wanted to manage Portland's competition, but lost the job to a newcomer: Reed Kroloff, who had just left Architecture magazine. Stastny literally has to live with the result: The tram is visible out his Madison Tower condominium.
So was it worth it?
Stastny chortles at the similar problems with a local competition he ran back in 1981: Pioneer Courthouse Square. The original $4 million budget ballooned to nearly $8 million, he recalls.
"The cost issues always go away after a while," Stastny says. "A year from now, everybody will be trying to take credit."
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575; randygragg@ news.oregonian.com
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