PCC's Sylvania Campus (image courtesy Portland Community College)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
In the first decade after World War II, the G.I. Bill made it possible for a generation of former service members to obtain an education. And obtain they did, on a massive scale. A total of 2.3 million students enrolled in higher education programs in 1947 swelled to nearly 5 million by 1960. In many cases, it wasn't traditional four-year colleges this wave of new students attended, but one of the literally hundreds of community college and junior colleges built in that period.
Portland Community College's Sylvania campus came a little later, in 1968. But it is the oldest facility in the PCC system, as well as the largest. Like many community colleges in the area and in the nation, it has the institutional feel of the era from which it came, that of Brutalism: a subset of modernist architecture from the 1960s and 70s that was most often concrete in form and, while utopian in its idealistic intent, was often practically the opposite in reality: with banal, repetitive forms that today, despite their clean-lined geometry, feel oppressive for their lack of human scale, natural light and warm materials. In the hands of a few select masters, such as Louis Kahn, Brutalist architecture could be sublime. But walking amidst the concrete ubiquity of PCC Sylvania or, one yearns for the small forest adjacent to the campus. (Sylvan literally means "wooded".)
Currently, however, GBD Architects and Gerding Edlen Development are working with PCC on a group of initiatives, some being enacted as we speak and others on a future wish list, that will help the school potentially save millions of dollars in energy costs while giving PCC a new role in training workers the emerging green economy.
The E6/Net Zero Project, as it is known, seeks to transform PCC Sylvania both in terms of how it operates and how it feels to be there. If the school greenlights all of the sustainable investments recommended, it will actually become a net-producer of energy, generating more electricity than the campus needs. The plan also calls for the school to have close to net-zero water usage by collecting rainwater and recycling water.
Nowhere is the need for reinvention more evident than the central DeBernardis College Center building ("CC" for short), which houses administrative offices, a dining hall, the Women's Resource Center, the Multicultural Center, and more. It's the closest thing to a student union, but unless you're in a select few private offices, it could be noon or midnight and you'd never be able to tell inside the public gathering spaces. And environmentally speaking, although concrete holds its thermal mass like a basement and is thus energy efficient as a material, much of the wintertime heating and summertime cooling disappear through single-pane windows.
Students in PCC Sylvania's CC buiding (image courtesy Portland Community College)
"It's got solid bones," GBD Architects' Kyle Andersen says of the concrete-ensconced PCC campus in Southwest Portland. "This thing is so stout. It’s all columns and beams and waffle slabs. You like to stand back and say, 'What were they thinking?' The architecture really handles you. Now those things are called barriers, and they cause problems for people with mobility issues and it’s disorienting. We talked about removing those barriers and humanizing the space.There’s a lot we’re doing taking private offices away from the windows and create smaller impromptu meeting spaces."
Besides the mechanical and energy side of reinventing PCC Sylvania, the architects are looking at humanizing the campus, where an open area between the buildings in the middle is disjointed because of a convoluted series of passageways and raised platforms, seemingly one added to the other without a sense of the congruent whole. When one moves from the center to the other buildings, it's a matter of following another prescriptive concrete pathway. Then there's the fact that PCC Sylvania students arrive overwhelmingly by car, thus making a surface parking lot surrounding much of the campus a kind of suburban-style banality of asphalt. Along with building design, the challenge is to make people change the way they get to the school.
Although net-zero energy and water are goals, the initial work at PCC Sylvania will focus on 165,000 square feet of renovation for existing buildings, within the strictures of funding in place via a recent bond measure. There will also be new construction, for a child development center construction. But for the most part, Andersen says, "These buildings are 40 plus years old. It’s upgrading the technology, adapting them for new ways of learning."
"Right now we’re base-lining the buildings: measuring the buildings’ performances so we can measure their improvements," the architect adds. "That’s really what it’s about to reach that net zero: starting with energy efficiency savings, and adding alternative energy over time. We’re looking at wind turbines, PV, even fuel cells."
"Students, faculty, facilities people—there are a lot of participants in the discussion. It’s really about consensus building. We meet with them depart by department, document their needs, draw it up, and give it to the contractor to see if it lines up with our budget. If we get it lined up, we have a framework plan. And we do that for every building. We’ve got to prioritize so there’s the most economic benefit and environmental benefit to the campus."
Infographic of PCC Sylvania buiding age (courtesy Gerding Edlen Development)
In some cases, Andersen says, grand plans gave way to the need for band-aids. "The whole E6 thing was supposed to come in and do all these changes and modifications. But then you realize there are changes in the system themselves that need changing. Insulation was falling off," he explains. "There are these tunnels under the buildings, with pipes running through them. There’s valving that was stuck open. We’re insulating pipes and replacing valves. We found that the boilers were really low-efficiency. We found by the time it got to the swimming pool, the hot water dropped by 30 degrees. We’re also adding a de-humidification unit, and taking the waste heat to pump it back into the air or water. That thing will save a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in energy."
As changes big and small are made, students will be along for the ride, not just receiving a better Sylvania campus but learning the kinds of trades that will bring them jobs in the emerging sustainable economy. "The workforce training that’s going on at PCC is a key component," Andersen says. "You'll be able to how to take care of building commissioning, photovoltaic cells. That’s why community colleges are bursting at the seems, why enrollment at PCC Sylvania up 30 percent in last year or two."
Already ties are being made. Vestas, the wind-turbine manufacture that recently located its American headquarters in Portland, now serves as an adviser for the Renewable Energy Systems Program offered at the PCC Sylvania Campus. The program is part of Sylvania’s Electronic Engineering Technology Program. SolarWorld is also a long-time partner organization with PCC’s Microelectronics Program, housed at the Rock Creek Campus. Over time, these partnerships and initiatives can combine and be centralized at Sylvania -- even if there's a boiler to fix, parking to reconfigure, and a host of concrete buildings to re-imagine.
"Our path has changed considerably. It’s been totally modified," Andersen explains. "We’re having to put money in different places to get to the root causes. But we still have our sights on that net zero campus. It's just a question of how we get there."
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