News

Section Menu

Search

If you build it, they will come back: Kevin Kelly '12 leads campus building project

Engineering

Portland Magazine

November 1, 2019

Kevin KellyWhen Kevin Kelly ’12 learned that the engineering firm where he worked was going to put in a bid to build Dundon- Berchtold Hall, he said to his boss, “If we get this job, I want to work on it.” The stars aligned, Fortis was hired as the contractor, and Kelly became the project engineer—the liaison between the University, the architects, and the masons and contractors actually putting this new signature academic building together. He had to know everything from the big-picture ambitions to minute details—such as the color of the bricks and the custom-made blades created for the inside trim.

And Kelly wasn’t the only UP civil engineering alum to work on the building. Structural engineer Aaron Wegner ’03, who also worked on Lund Family Hall and plans to return for the new Physical Plant, engineered the steel frame, the bracing, the foundation, and the basement walls.

Steven O’Dowd ’12, also a structural engineer, designed and implemented the specific type of anchoring (called “cladding”) used to affix the brick and the limestone to the structure of the building, accounting for wind surface pressures, seismic load, and even the chemical compatibility to the limestone.

The limestone—a signature feature of the building—is an unusual material for the Northwest. In other locations the limestone might have been cut onsite, but this limestone had to be cut to exact design and specifications in Indiana before being shipped here in 30 semi-trucks. “Putting it together was almost like a giant puzzle,” Kelly says.

How cool is it that these alumni are applying their engineering knowledge—which they first gained here as civil engineering majors on The Bluff—to their alma mater? All three of them spoke highly of their engineering professors, the community they found here, and the opportunity to give back to UP. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime project,” says Kelly.

We caught Kelly on his last day onsite in late August, after starting in February of 2018. He has an additional connection to UP because his parents, Pat Kelly ’76 and Kathy Kelly ’79, met here, and his brother James ’08 also went here, and so it makes sense that he thinks of UP in terms of generations and legacy. “I wanted to build a place my kids could go to,” he says.