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

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.

Water tells a ‘story’

The south side is the real green showcase.

Wysong’s sculptures sit next to water filtration swales that take runoff from Southeast Water Avenue and filter it before sending it to the Willamette.

The river is accessible again from Water Avenue, in the form of a pedestrian plaza at Southeast Clay Street. Rainwater from the roof spurts out of downspouts into troughs of river pebbles. They’re treating storm water from the neighboring streets, not just their own roof, which is going above and beyond what LEED requires.

“The idea of the landscaping was to express the story of the water traveling through the site,” Hoagland says. The city’s Bureau of Environmental Services is using the site as a showcase. Expect a steady trickle of city planners soon.

Another conspicuous green feature is the double interactive wall of glass that has been added to the south side. It takes advantage of the sun’s warming rays in winter. In summer it helps shade the building and with the vents open, the hot air can be moved around through vents and thus cool the building.

The owners expect the building to use 51 percent less energy than a new code-compliant building would. LEED, Alto says, is making a difference.

“I’ve been around a while and there have been various enticements in the state of Oregon to do more in terms of energy, but they come and go,” Alto says. “But with LEED in the last five years, it’s a way to market a building, it gives you a benchmark. Plus it’s the right thing to do.”

Upstairs, Haladay agrees. The Lake Oswego resident’s vacation home in Whistler, British Columbia, is not a green building. “We got it in the 1990s,” he says as though talking of a far-off time. However, he’s having a home built in Hawaii right now that hews to green principles.

Commutes came into play

Haladay’s motivation for moving was part financial. He and his wife own Coaxis, which makes back-end software used in the food and beverage industry and in construction.

For estate-planning purposes it makes sense to own their building. But Haladay also ran the payroll ZIP codes a few years back and saw that staff members were commuting to the Tigard headquarters from as far away as Gresham and Vancouver, Wash., and many lived on the east side.

“I thought it would be good to have an office equidistant from my staff’s homes, and also to be near the talented young people who are moving to Portland. They don’t come to Portland to live in Hillsboro.”

The 120 members of the Coaxis staff in Portland share about half of the building’s 176 parking passes. Spots were assigned by seniority, but Haladay says many are keen to get to work by bike and bus. “If they really need to use a public lot, I’ll pay for it for now. I don’t want parking to be an issue.”

With the boathouse there, you could even come by kayak. Haladay brightens at the idea.

“The river as transportation is really underutilized,” he says, rattling off a list of stops from Oregon City to St. Johns that could serve as jet-boat stops.

Coaxis trains out-of-towners to use its software, and he would like to see a water taxi take them back and forth between the classrooms in RiverEast and the RiverPlace hotel where they stay. (Baltimore, where Coaxis has 50 staff members, does it, he says, so why can’t Portland?)

Haladay is a colorful manager if not a maverick, and Coaxis’ stylish offices reflect that. The boardroom tables are wacky shapes, the better to thwart people’s instinct to rush for a power seat. The cubicles are modish and colorful. There are lights sunk into the floor that make a path to the boss’s office. And a round conference room in the center is all-glass so as not to block the river view.

Used to moving quickly, Haladay wasn’t totally impressed with dealing with local government. The project took three years instead of two because there were so many agencies to deal with, he says.

He plans to give some written feedback. As a company that brings in 93 percent of its revenue from out of state, he feels Coaxis could have been courted a little more strongly.

There’s still not a lot around there – for lunch choices you can walk north to Bakery Bar or south to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry cafe. Understandably, the building owners hope to bring in a sandwich store on the Water Avenue side.

But there’s an excited, pioneer vibe about the place, which could serve as a model for the rest of the inner east-side industrial area. If life can flourish this well under these bridges, the future looks bright, and green.

josephgallivan@portlandtribune.com