Last summer, Paul Schwer, a green mechanical engineer, met with Portland, Ore., Mayor Ted Wheeler to talk about a subject dear to him—resilient structures for the earthquake-prone city. Those who don’t know Schwer, president of PAE Consulting Engineers Inc., might question why a mechanical engineer would be asking a mayor for a city grant program to make new office buildings as quake-resistant as hospitals.
The answer involves Schwer’s pet project—a 58,000-sq-ft speculative office building that started construction on April 1 in Portland’s Skidmore/Old Town historic district. The five-story PAE Living Building, named after its prime tenant, is on course to be the first—and the largest—privately developed office building to be fully certified under the rigorous Living Building Challenge sustainability program of the International Living Future Institute (ILFI). And if it opens as expected in September 2021, it also will be one of very few developer buildings designed to survive a magnitude-7.5 quake with barely a scratch.