A ‘Critical’ Project For Community Health

Arctic Sheet Metal installed multiple architectural metal panels at the 32,000-square-foot Carol Danielson Suzuki Cancer Center.

In Oregon, approximately 20,000 residents are diagnosed with an invasive cancer each year, state officials say. 

But now people battling the disease in Clackamas County won’t have to travel as far to receive treatment for it. That’s because the 32,000-square-foot Carol Danielson Suzuki Cancer Center has opened at Providence Willamette Falls Medical Center in Oregon City, allowing area patients to get chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments closer to home.

The new $16-million facility makes extensive use of architectural metal panels, installed by SMACNA member Arctic Sheet Metal of Portland, Oregon. The exterior features warm colors of copper brown and gray, and the interior uses a mix of white and copper panels for a striking contrast.

Arctic won the $925,000 contract, which included installing mineral wool insulation underneath the exterior siding, a furring system between the wall and the panels, and aluminum composite material (ACM) panels in three colors. It also included installing mechanical screen walls, a small roof on top of a stair tower and sheet metal flashing. 

Work started in fall 2022. All panels were manufactured by Alpolic and Pac-Clad. The cancer center used 14,000 square feet of Alpolic panels, 800 square feet of roofing panels from Pac-Clad and 6.500 square feet of Pac-Clad siding panels. The panels had to be measured prior to installation to ensure they fit, says Ricky Mills, Arctic’s Field Supervisor on the project.  

“We spent like a week and a half or two weeks of going through and measuring every square inch of the exterior to make sure that the panels came out to the right size,” Mills says. 

Working in a 24/7 environment 
Performing sometimes noisy construction work at a regional medical center that’s open 24/7 presents unique challenges, say Mills and Eric Miller, Arctic’s Architectural Operations Manager. Among them: figuring out how to work on a busy hospital campus without bothering patients and staff.

The noise became a problem during a stretch of warm fall days early in the project. 

“We were working on the north elevation of the building,” Mills recalls, adding that four to six Arctic workers were usually at the worksite. “It’s this really narrow alleyway and the only way to access it is with diesel boom lifts. We really had to tone the noise down and shut our lifts off. The alleyway is only about 20 feet wide. We had to be respectful to patients, and, at the same time, still be efficient.”

The solution, like many things in construction, was communication. 

“Every time we wanted to drill on that side or do any anchoring to that side of the building, we had to give the general contractor Fortis a day heads-up before we made any noise,” Mills says. “And we could only do it between certain hours.” 

Also notable about the work, according to Miller, was that it was a “delegated design” project. “That meant we had to have an outside engineer come in and tell us what size screws to use, how often to attach our furring or flashings or whatnot, based off the structural calculations they come up with,” he says. “And this one was kind of unique because the building was not 16 inches on center framed — it was 24 inches on center framed. So we had to go through a couple rounds of engineering to get everything to work.”

But while the project had its challenges, it also had parts where everything seemed to go right, too. For example, Mills says, the framing was very accurate.

“The framing was incredibly straight and that was huge,” he says. “A lot of the reveal lines in our ACM panels followed almost 360 degrees around the building. And a lot of those lined up with this giant curtain wall around the building. I remember measuring from one side of the building to the other with a laser and ... it was like three-sixteenths off from one end of the building to the other. That’s pretty rare these days.”

Based in Portland, Arctic Sheet Metal is closing in on 50 years in business. It was founded in 1977 by Douglas McQuown. The company’s values haven’t changed, officials say, although the sheet metal and HVAC industry certainly has. Officials say Arctic was one of the first sheet metal contractors in the region to extensively use computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) in its shop and building information modeling (BIM) on projects to make coordination easier. 

Arctic has an extensive background in architectural work. Its client list includes educational institutions, health care, hotels, municipal buildings, office complexes and even the state capitol.