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Renewal on the riverbank

Green updates cost more than a new building, but firms say they were worth it

By Joseph Gallivan

Pamplin Media Group, May 8, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

Jim Clark / Pamplin Media Group

Tucked beneath the eastern ramps of the Hawthorne Bridge, the converted warehouse Jay Haladay’s software company shares with an architecture firm was a “disaster” when he first saw it three years ago.

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The view from Jay Haladay’s corner office is brand-new. From his desk he looks west, straight down both barrels of the Hawthorne Bridge. As well as the continuous parade of cyclists and joggers, cars heading east off the bridge pass within a few feet of his triple-glazed windows, in eerie silence.

Haladay, the president and chief executive officer of software maker Coaxis Inc., and Jeff Reaves, the president of Group Mackenzie, an engineering and architecture firm, bought the building at 1515 S.E. Water Ave., and their firms moved in in April.

Three years ago, when they were first shown the space by then-owners the Portland Development Commission, “it was a disaster,” Haladay says. “It was nasty, only the rats and the bats were in it. It was a building only an architect could love.”

Seven Group Mackenzie architects set to work renovating the building, now called RiverEast Center. The company’s 130 staff members are vacating their space near the Old Spaghetti Factory off Southwest Macadam Avenue (where rents are on the rise) for a showpiece of postindustrial chic.

Both Reaves and Haladay wanted an energy-efficient building, a concept as popular these days as it is vague. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System is the flavor of the decade with developers, but it’s much easier for a new building to attain the top rating, platinum, than for a renovated old warehouse to do so.

“What we did cost way beyond what we needed to accommodate our staff,” says Peter Alto, the Group Mackenzie senior associate who served as project manager. It would have been cheaper to tear down the building and build a new one. “But we’re on track to get a LEED Gold certification.”

They cut open the east side of the building where trains used to pull up and load C&H Sugar, Quaker Oats and Coca-Cola when the 1951 structure was the Holman Transfer Building. In the space they built a passively cooled lobby with a relief vent in the roof that can be opened up on hot days.

Inside Group Mackenzie’s large portion of the building you can see how they recycled the space.

“We reused over 75 percent of what was used here, and 100 percent of the structure,” architect Alison Hoagland says.

For instance, where windows were cut into the concrete, some of the slabs have been turned into public art (as part of the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Percent for Art program) by local sculptor Linda Wysong.

On a recent morning she was painting the anti-grafitti coating on the monoliths while landscapers worked around her planting trees and burying brown irrigation lines.

Art brings out the layers

Wysong cut circles in the slabs to expose more of the river pebbles in the concrete, holes that line up if you stand in the right place. “I want to give a sense of layers,” she says, “both the geological layers and the historical layers of the land use.”

“As you strip away the interior of the old offices you expose the columns and see what you have to work with,” Hoagland says. The building also was seismically upgraded with steel and concrete supports. Data raceways (long wire trays) run along the ceiling carrying dozens of blue data cables, a Pompidou touch that never goes out of fashion.

While the carpet is low in VOCs (the volatile organic compounds some consider to be unhealthy) and has no PVCs (polyvinyl chloride, a toxic plastic), the cubicles themselves will need some airing out, since they smell strongly of plastic.

The high ceilings have sound baffles to reduce noise. Architects like to work in ever-changing small groups, so the low cubicles and high ceilings should encourage that, according to Alto.

Also, he hasn’t noticed anything in the way of fumes or foul smells from the nearby freeway, and Hoagland says since the windows don’t open, it wouldn’t affect the staff.

Between the building and the river a particularly desolate stretch under Interstate 5 has been landscaped. It no longer looks like a homeless encampment and connects the Portland Boathouse with the bike path and the boat launch. All these healthy people scampering about look like the antidote to industrial grimness.