Warmer Is Cooler

Internal Sustainability Programs

Ballet in the Sky

A new vision for an old building

HVAC needs for growing, processing, and selling marijuana

At the corner of Fifth Avenue and F Street in downtown Anchorage, the old KeyBank building was never much to look at. That’s about to change thanks to a major renovation, the subject of this month’s cover article, “Downtown Glacier.” Elsewhere in this month’s Architecture & Engineering special section, the renovation is one example of how those distinct yet similar professions are stronger together, in “It Takes Two.”

Outside of the section, engineers also contribute to “Internal Sustainability Programs” as surely as they plan “Before Disaster Strikes.” Likewise, “Warmer Is Cooler” about heat pumps in Juneau echoes some of the mechanical engineering detailed in “Cannabis Cool.” Don’t confuse indoor marijuana cultivation with “Bringing in the Green,” which is about biophilic design that, independently, some small businesses have discovered as a COVID-19 niche, as reported in “Silver Linings.” Whether flashy or unseen, the designed environment is all around.

or thirteen years, Purrfect Purr Cat Hotel has offered pet sitting and boarding services for felines in Anchorage. Guest pets can indulge in a variety of activities, including socializing with other fur babies in a stimulating and safe environment. The facility provides the cats with constant observation, high-quality food, plenty of space to lounge and play, and even a trip to the vet if they get sick. “We provide everything; you just drop the cat off,” says owner Elaine Parry, a Navy veteran and former air traffic controller.

For Parry—who has always loved cats—operating Purrfect Purr Cat Hotel is a labor of love. But in 2020, the successful enterprise was threatened when the COVID-19 pandemic forced non-essential businesses to temporarily close. Purrfect Purr Cat Hotel was shuttered for two months, and it nearly devastated the business. To stay afloat, Parry applied for a loan from a local credit union, which proved to be extremely problematic. The problem wasn’t a lack of creditworthiness on her part, according to Parry. She owned her own home, had ample retirement income, and even offered to collateralize the requested $45,000 loan with her rental property, a condominium worth $98,000 and owned free and clear. But her loan request with the credit union was unfruitful. “They really treated me poorly,” says Parry, a thirty-year Alaska resident. “They didn’t refuse the loan; they just drug it out, dropped me, and wouldn’t respond anymore… I had to file a complaint against them.”

he COVID-19 pandemic has been less than kind to small businesses.

The Alaska Small Business Development Center’s 2020 Annual Report, which surveyed 550 small business owners across the state, found that 60 percent of businesses experienced decreased revenue in 2020, between 25 percent and 95 percent lower compared to previous years. Fifty percent of businesses surveyed said adapting to COVID was the biggest challenge they faced in 2020.

Despite those challenges, business license applications soared during the pandemic. According to the Alaska Division of Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing, the state issued 25,309 businesses licenses in FY2021, a 79.8 percent increase from the 14,072 licenses it issued in FY2020.

n 2020, Coastal Villages Region Fund (CVRF) generated $91.6 million in gross revenue. Because CVRF is a nonprofit, it doesn’t qualify for Alaska Business’ Top 49ers list, but if it did, it would have placed in the mid-thirties on the list, between Usibelli Coal Mine and Watterson Construction.

While CVRF is a nonprofit organization, it does not accept any charitable donations. All of the organization’s revenue is generated through fisheries investment. “We operate a seafood company and all of the revenue comes in through the catching, processing, and sale of Alaska seafood,” says CVRF’s CEO Eric Deakin. It is one of six Western Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) Program groups.

According to NOAA Fisheries: “The Community Development Quota Program was established (i) to provide eligible western Alaska villages with the opportunity to participate and invest in fisheries in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Management Area; (ii) to support economic development in western Alaska; (iii) to alleviate poverty and provide economic and social benefits for residents of western Alaska; and (iv) to achieve sustainable and diversified local economies in western Alaska.” Today, 10 percent of Alaska’s fisheries are set aside for CDQ groups.

he dazzling dance of the aurora borealis draws thousands of tourists from out of state to Fairbanks and the Far North every year. While the pandemic has stifled the strategic development of international markets for the winter season in Alaska, there has been a surge in tourists from the Lower 48 seeking the exotic winter phenomenon while remaining in the United States.

“By far and away our greatest selling point that has enabled us to be so successful in our winter tourism has been the northern lights,” says Scott McCrea, the president and CEO of Explore Fairbanks.

il price responsiveness to the fundamental economic principles of supply and demand remains on full display as the pandemic drags on with new variants and subsequent market scares.

“At the onset of the pandemic, when governments around the world started implementing shutdowns and stay-at-home orders, the demand for petroleum products just bottomed out,” says Nick Szymoniak, venture development lead for Alaska Gasline Development Corporation and a former consultant for the McKinley Research Group.

People stopped driving. People stopped flying. There was an unprecedented plummet in demand for petroleum.

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he KeyBank Plaza in downtown Anchorage is no more. The magnitude 7.1 earthquake on November 30, 2018, killed it.

Oh, the nine-story building still stands at the corner of Fifth Avenue and F Street, but earthquake damage left it uninhabitable, so KeyBank has vacated as anchor tenant. Now the building is known by its address as 601 W. Fifth. Along with the new name, the building is getting a new look.

“The 601 building takes the precedent of the old structure and tries to retrofit it… inspired loosely by Alaska glaciers,” says Derrick Chang, general manager of 601 5th Avenue LLC. Based on that inspiration, the Seattle-based architecture firm Perkins&Will drew a design that strips the skin off the building, reinforces the skeleton, and puts a glazed covering on 33,000 square feet of new rentable space.

building will never again look as good as it did at the ribbon cutting. In comparison, the ribbon cutting for a landscape marks the start of another five years or more to give it time to grow in and begin to mature. Then, depending on the maintenance it receives, a landscape will continue to evolve forever. As the adage goes, “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Landscapes are a long-term investment, and as such they can have high installation costs. They also aren’t always optional. Many jurisdictions in Alaska have specific landscape requirements for undeveloped and previously developed properties, including the Municipality of Anchorage, Fairbanks North Star Borough, City of Palmer, and City of Wasilla. These codes mandate the type and extent of landscape that needs to be installed, although they often leave it open (to various degrees) to how those requirements are met. A stipulation within these codes is that the landscapes are maintained in compliance with their permitted conditions, and some of these jurisdictions require bonds to guarantee that plants establish successfully.

rchitects and engineers are two related professions that frequently get lumped together. How many casual conversations have declared a building, roadway, transportation, or utility system an “architectural” or “engineering” feat, interchangeably? To some degree, both deserve credit; an architect and engineer likely worked together on any given project. However, these two fields approach a project from different perspectives and tackle specific problems to deliver a finished product with both style and substance.

arthquakes, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, and landslides: Alaskans endure a volatile landscape of natural disasters. Whenever these catastrophic events occur, engineers have already prepared for the worst. Whether it’s a dam, a road, an office building, or a hospital, all of the state’s infrastructure is designed to anticipate 10-year, 50-year, or even 100-year disasters in addition to human-caused damage that may occur during its lifetime.

enowned for its majestic wilderness and awe-inspiring landscapes, Alaska faces extraordinary hurdles when it comes to bringing green spaces into its commercial buildings. Despite these barriers, biophilic elements are important for Alaska buildings.

“Plants or biophilic elements certainly have their place in every building type,” says Dana Nunn, the director of interior design at Bettisworth North. “How you implement those biophilic elements certainly depends on… climates, daylight, budget, ability to maintain something that’s going to be good versus an eyesore that suddenly starts to undo the good of the biophilic imagery.”

Biophilic design originates from the work of psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who defined biophilia as the “passionate love of life and of all that is alive.” The theory in design has evolved to focus on increasing building occupants’ direct and indirect connections to the natural environment.

The biophilic touches designed into a building’s interior or exterior can play an important role in the health and well-being of those who use the spaces, Nunn explains.

ith all of the disruption and changes to how we communicate, it is more challenging than ever for teams to pick up the phone. The pandemic certainly put us on a fast track to remote work, cloud migration, chatting, and emailing. However, there is still and always will be a need for conversations. Time and time again, I have asked a team member if they’ve responded to a client, and too often the answer is, “I emailed them last week.” I respond with, “So, have we confirmed a resolution or decision?” “I am not sure; they did not answer.” PICK UP THE DARN PHONE!

Technology has glitches, emails get buried, and people infer tone and meaning in chats. Simply calling a client, a prospective employer, or a sales lead is polite and develops a deeper relationship.

hen Alaskans voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in 2014, opponents of the ballot initiative relied on several lines of argument. They warned of trouble hiring employees who could pass drug tests, of intoxicated driving, of use by children, and of disappointing tax revenues. What nobody talked about, pro or con, was the smell.

As the cannabis industry has grown, the distinct skunky odor (primarily caused by the chemical myrcene) has become a familiar scent, even to Alaskans who’ve never been in the same room as a marijuana product. Blame careless consumers allowing their private use to escape into the public space; the industry itself is subject to state and local regulations which, unlike the 2014 campaign, do take odor into consideration.

athy Muse doesn’t like using Craiglist that much, but there was something she really wanted to get rid of: her oil tank and all the oil inside it. So she went online and posted it.

“It’s half price if you can pump it!”

Thanks to her new air source heat pump, she didn’t need it anymore. Ditching her oil tank and Toyo stove was a long-awaited milestone for Muse, a Juneau resident who raised four kids in Alaska’s capital city and now has grandchildren there.

The Greater Mooses Tooth #2 drill site in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska achieved first oil on December 12, according to ConocoPhillips. The milestone arrives three years after first oil from Greater Mooses Tooth #1, eight miles to the northeast. Peak production is estimated at approximately 30,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, for a development cost of about $1.4 billion.
alaska.conocophillips.com

A pair of Southern Hemisphere oil companies with interests in the Far North are joining forces. Shareholders of Papua New Guinea-based Oil Search approved a merger with Australian firm Santos. The $6.1 billion deal gives Santos 61.5 percent control of the combined company. Oil Search acquired the Pikka project on the North Slope in 2018 and has since taken up residence in the former BP headquarters in Midtown Anchorage. Oil Search expects to begin producing from Pikka in 2025, and Santos has previously expressed support for the project.
oilsearch.com | santos.com

kiers on Anchorage’s cross-country trails might unknowingly cross paths with a telecommunications pioneer. Sandra Blinstrubas has been President of Microcom since the mid-‘80s, when the oil price crash ended her career as a state contractor and she met Chuck Schumann, who founded the company in 1984. At that time, hundreds of villages lacked local phone service, long-distance calling was an ordeal, and network TV was recorded in Seattle and the tapes were flown north for delayed broadcast. Microcom brought satellite links to the Last Frontier—and linked Blinstrubas and Schumann as a married couple. Their son now also works at Microcom, managing its broadband business.