Case Study: Sandy High School

Other lessons can be learned about the use of western red cedar in the conception, design, and construction of Sandy High School. The project stands in the town of Sandy, located about 30 miles east of Portland, Oregon, on what was once the Oregon Trail. The relatively small community of fewer than 10,000 residents, which has long billed itself as the “Gateway to Mount Hood,” has long counted its regional history and rural character as essential parts of the collective local identity.

To make sure that this ethos was reflected in the town's nonresidential buildings, in 2008 town officials in Sandy codified the “Sandy Style,” a municipal design standard that expressed its underlying goal to “protect and enhance the city's quality of life and community image.” Specifically, the design guidelines aim to “express elements of or reflect Cascadian architecture by adapting appropriate elements of English Arts and Crafts Style (1900-1920) and Oregon Rustic Style (1915-1940) … into new buildings and exterior remodels.”

Local Design Standards. In drafting the code with input from area residents, Sandy officials also sought to “encourage green building practices in new construction” and to discourage “box-like structures with large, blank, unarticulated wall surfaces.”³ Though short of a pattern book, the design standard alludes to specific stylistic dimensions of the region's vernacular, including:

• Steeply pitched roofs and gables.

• Strong base materials using stone, block, or brick.

• Exposed heavy timbers or natural wood beams, posts, and trim.

• Use of warm earth-tone paint colors or brick, or both.

• Articulated building facades with prominent covered entries.

• Windows to allow viewing into the building.

• Public gathering spaces.

• Pedestrian focused site layout, parking and vehicle access.

The town has required compliance with Sandy Style design guidelines for new construction, replacements of structures destroyed by fire, additions to existing buildings, and site improvements such as landscaping, parking and civic spaces.

The Sandy Style seemed an ideal touchstone for a new, public high school to replace a 90-year-old facility that had outlived its usefulness. Contracted to design this major project, Portland-based Dull Olson Weekes-IBI Group Architects (DOWA-IBI)—known nationally for designing major secondary-school facilities—embraced the challenge of conceiving a building with a contemporary yet regionally appropriate aesthetic that would reflect and conform to the Sandy Style rules. Given that the use of the new code was somewhat untested in the context of a large, civic building, DOWA-IBI Group principals took their cue from the celebrated Timberline Lodge, which sits on nearby Mount Hood, in the Cascades, about 30 miles east of Sandy.

(As background, Timberline Lodge was a WPA or Works Progress Administration project, and its construction began in 1936 and was completed in 1938, shortly after a September 1937 dedication ceremony led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The lodge, which remains a model of the Cascadian architecture that was popularized in the Pacific Northwest during the early part of the 20th century—and whose exterior Stanley Kubrick used to establish the character of the Overlook Hotel in his classic 1980 film The Shining—was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1977. It remains an iconic example of the architectural style residents of Sandy sought to codify in 2008. Built primarily using regionally harvested timber, Timberline Lodge was the Pacific Northwest's answer to the traditional alpine architecture of Europe.)

Durability and Maintenance. Even with such inspiration, Jerry Waters, a senior design architect with DOWA-IBI, points out that many officials charged with building a new $85 million school would likely shy away from a wood exterior over concerns about its long-term durability and maintenance costs. Understanding what residents of Sandy want to achieve in terms of the look and functionality of their public buildings, Waters and his colleagues convinced the town and school district leaders that western red cedar, used in conjunction with brick and precast concrete, could be “very economical,” in addition to giving the new high school the desired aesthetic.

The design concept included heavy-timber western red cedar frames and uncoated western red cedar board siding in a modern Cascadian interpretation. The roofline is pitched, as local rules request, and the massing is decidedly asymmetrical. Winglike clerestory skylights merge with an innovative collage of western red cedar slats, horizontal western red cedar cladding, and a heavy timber portico. To further adhere to the newly adopted Sandy Style, DOWA-IBI designed the 310,000-square-foot building to be empathetic to its context not only in color and materiality but also to “fit into the landscape” rather than interrupt it. As reported by Cliff Pearson in Architectural Record, Waters and his colleagues “broke the mass of the building into a number of pieces and tucked them into the sloping, wooded site.”

“The building needed to live in nature, just as the people around here do,” said John Weekes, AIA, a principal with DOWA-IBI Group, in an interview about the project. He has also said that architecture is, “about the human experience, the thing that makes people say, 'I want to be here.'”

In addition, the building had to be green: Waters says that sustainability was and remains a “very high priority” to residents of Sandy. The architects and their team of consultants (see sidebar “Integrated MEP Design,” next page) then developed a whole-building sustainability plan incorporating a long list of green building strategies. The overall goal was to “reduce the school's carbon footprint and tie it to the environmental ethos of the Pacific Northwest,” and in the process achieve a LEED certification of Gold.⁴

By designing a four-story facility organized along perpendicular axes that follow the site's hillside topography, Waters and his colleagues limited the amount of excavation that would have been required for a more conventional high-school siting approach. This one move also reduced site-preparation costs and oriented the building in a way that would improve energy performance while reducing operating costs. The inclusion of the clerestory skylights, solar panels, and rainwater-collection system contribute to the building running 54 percent more efficiently than energy-use guidelines set forth by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for comparable educational facilities.