The City of Hillsboro is creating a new kind of police headquarters, one designed around the health, safety and wellbeing of the people who serve their community. The Hillsboro Police Headquarters pairs exposed mass timber with daylight, wetland views and connections to nature to create a more restorative environment for officers and staff. At the same time, this Risk Category IV essential facility is designed to remain operational following a major seismic event, demonstrating how mass timber can support both human wellbeing and the demanding resilience requirements of mission-critical public safety infrastructure.

This tour will take visitors beyond the finished architecture and into the decisions, details and construction behind it. Through learning stations hosted by the City of Hillsboro, Police Department, design team, builder and trade partners, attendees will explore how officer wellness and biophilic design shaped the project, then see how that vision is carried through Oregon-manufactured CLT and glulam, the hybrid timber-steel structural system, seismic connections, and geotechnical solutions developed for a challenging wetland-adjacent site. The tour will share practical lessons from designing and building mass timber in a high-seismic region and demonstrate how those lessons can help inform the next generation of police, fire and other essential facilities.

The Oregon Acoustic Research Lab (OARL) and associated Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory (ESBL) is a mass timber building delivered through a collaborative design-build partnership between LEVER Architecture and Andersen Construction. The University of Oregon, LEVER’s long term mass timber research partner, in partnership with the Oregon Mass Timber Coalition, set out to build a state-of-the-art lab to test the acoustic performance of mass-timber floor and ceiling assemblies. With funding from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, the lab is the first project at the Port of Portland’s Mass Timber Housing Innovation Campus and a critical component of the Coalition’s strategic vision to transform Terminal 2 into a North American hub for mass timber innovation. The facility will produce reliable and repeatable acoustical test results, with the potential to unlock utilization of mass-timber assemblies in low, mid, and high-rise housing and commercial buildings well beyond where it is today.

While the design is driven primarily by the specific clearance and technical requirements of the acoustic chambers, the intent was to express the industrial character of the site, and the function of the project, with the materials and form. The towering glulam and mass plywood box is clad in folded weathering steel inspired by a spectrogram, a visual representation of frequency and intensity of sound, giving the building a dynamic appearance. The ground floor offices are clad in rough-sawn juniper harvested from Central Oregon, a material linked to habitat restoration projects LEVER first piloted on the Oregon Conservation Center.

Mississippi Workshop is the first commercial project in Oregon to use mass timber construction for all components of the building’s structure. The building was designed, developed, and built by Waechter Architecture as a proving ground for sustainable building systems and ‘all-wood’ construction technologies. Other than a ‘rain jacket’ of weathering steel on the exterior and radiant concrete flooring, all surfaces within the building are exposed wood without the need for additional finishes or fireproofing. This approach creates a simplicity and wholeness that is absent in standard CLT or traditional frame construction and creates spaces with uncommon warmth, beauty, and durability.

With the principles of economy, constructability, and agility serving as key drivers, the organization of Mississippi creates distinct zones for programs and services. The building is comprised of six equal rooms, stacked in three tiers on each side of a shared courtyard.  Every decision, from the building’s simple and clear organization to the integration of healthy materials and efficient building systems such as all-electric, refrigerant-free, hydronic heating and cooling systems, embodies the principles of resilience and enduring design. The ultimate goal of the project was to create a replicable and adaptive model for a future-proof building that also possesses a strong sense of identity, grace, and permanence.