Pacific Northwest College of Art needed a new space to anchor its growing campus in downtown Portland. The college found what it needed by renovating one of Portland’s historic gems—the city’s original main post office built in 1918.

The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design showcases PNCA’s vision and entrepreneurship through an imaginative historic building renovation of a government building into an inspiring, sustainable and energy-efficient campus hub. The LEED® Platinum building is lit with skylights and LEDs and kept comfortable with an efficient variable refrigerant flow HVAC system. The renovation preserves the building’s exterior and marble-lined corridors, but includes interior improvements like exposing the original skylights, which had been covered for 40 years, and renovating the mail sorting room into a collaborative atrium.

PNCA received $288,914 in cash incentives from Energy Trust for design assistance, energy modeling, energy-efficient equipment and building commissioning. The small private college expects to save 813,700 annual kilowatt hours of electricity and 3,200 annual therms of natural gas, equivalent to $64,700 in annual energy costs savings.