by Brendan Nordstrom

A major educational building under construction in Portland draws inspiration from a Harpswell icon — the Cribstone Bridge.

Northeastern University’s Roux Institute held a design contest for the Alfond Center on its new, $500 million Portland campus. The design needed to embody Maine, leading the CambridgeSeven architecture firm to the historic span between Orr’s and Bailey islands.

Timothy Mansfield, president of CambridgeSeven, said the firm has known about the Cribstone Bridge for many years and felt inspired by the bridge’s innovative design and its use of local materials, such as Yarmouth granite.

The bridge, built in 1928 and also known as the Bailey Island Bridge, employs a cribwork of granite slabs to adapt to the conditions in the channel, allowing swift tidal currents to flow through the structure. The bridge is one of two of its kind ever constructed and the only one left in the world.

“The Cribstone Bridge is a wonderful icon in the state, and the fact that it has survived and performed beautifully over the years was very influential to us,” Mansfield said. “It embodied so much of what we were very interested in and cared about.”

David and Barbara Roux, founders of the Roux Institute, selected CambridgeSeven’s design as the winner. The Rouxs, who have a home in Harpswell, previously worked with the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm to design the Roux Center for the Environment at Bowdoin College.

The Roux Institute is a graduate program at Northeastern created to “educate generations of local talent for the digital, artificial intelligence and life sciences sectors, and drive sustained economic growth in northern New England,” according to Northeastern Global News.

The Roux Institute opened in 2020 and has been leasing space at the Wex building on Fore Street in Portland since then. The new campus will be on the site of the former B&M Baked Beans plant on the east side of Portland.

Mansfield said the Cribstone Bridge’s influence will come alive in the design for the central academic building — the 245,000-square-foot Alfond Center — in both a physical and metaphorical way. The building borrows its name from the Harold Alfond Foundation, a major supporter of the project.

“We took the idea of the bridge metaphorically, as the institute is bridging technologies, bridging education, all the notions of bridging in that form,” Mansfield said.

The design for the Alfond Center features an opening called “The Portal” that reflects the opening in the Cribstone Bridge. The Portal will be a gathering space with seating, as well as a place for lectures, conferences, meetings and more.

The Alfond Center will have a “curvilinear” design “billowing out to Casco Bay,” as Mansfield put it. The building will include “computational academic spaces, life science labs and advanced active-learning classrooms,” according to Boston Real Estate Times.

In addition, the campus will include a building that will serve as an incubator for young companies, as well as a coastal path, parking garage, child care center and green space.

Mansfield said it is “absolutely paramount” that the Alfond Center’s design is sustainable. The building will be all-electric, with power coming from geothermal wells.

The building will incorporate a three-story section built with mass timber, an emerging sustainable construction material. And, like the Cribstone Bridge, it will use Maine granite — in this case, Freshwater Pearl granite quarried in Frankfort, a town on the Penobscot River in Waldo County.

The project broke ground on Sept. 13, 2024, and is expected to be complete by the fall of 2027. The first step is constructing the geothermal wells and the foundation, which is the hardest part, Mansfield said. Next, steel will begin to rise and the building will take form.

“This idea that Portland is a vibrant, forward-looking city with this amazing history, we don’t want to lose the history at all, but we also want to embrace the future,” Mansfield said. “The Roux Institute is bridging that, which is another relationship to the Cribstone Bridge. We’re bridging the past to the future.”