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Working in Alaska's harsh winters always provides challenges, but so does working without a firm contract in place.

A tight budget, a rural location on the cliffs above the Columbia River Gorge and a jobsite attached to a 100-year-old museum listed on the National Register of Historic Places combined to challenge designers and contractors on a 25,500-sq-ft expansion of the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, Wash.

A shining example of the roster of outstanding projects in the Pacific Northwest sits perched on a high hillside overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. The expansion and renovation of the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, Wash., features a design that is both modernistic and respectful of the existing historic site, combining smart engineering and well-executed construction.

Anderson Construction crews faced a tight footprint when delivering the nearly $50-million science center at Oregon State University.

Howard S. Wright, Portland, credits a personalized, morale-boosting safety culture combined with intricate planning for its clean safety record on the $14-million, three-story student center on the Corvallis, Ore., campus.

Using a worker-to-worker observation program that paired up two different trades to study the crew's work on the $117-million Central Washington Hospital Patient Tower in Wenatchee, Wash., the team logged 489,934 man-hours without a lost-time accident.

Even with the difficulty of planning for the unknown, Turner Construction's mantra during renovation of Seattle's 100-year-old Pike Place Market on a bustling downtown hillside was "overcommunicate and minimize surprises."

A $107-million six-mile, single-track extension of the Portland Streetcar Loop was built entirely within city streets, presenting traffic management issues.

To balance sustainable energy practices and historic preservation for a rail station project, McKinstry traveled to Washington, D.C., to get special permission for its design of the SIERR Building at McKinstry Station from the National Park Service.

The 900,000-sq-ft headquarters revitalizes a city block in downtown Seattle and brings together 1,500 employees onto one campus. The $500-million LEED-Platinum project includes two boomerang-shaped structures with gardens and a 15,000-sq-ft interactive museum.