Portland Commons Residence Hall and McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success

The Portland Campus Development Project includes the addition of a three-story, 42,000-square-foot McGoldrick Center for Career & Student Success, the 218,000-square-foot Portland Commons Residence Hall and a one-acre Residential Quad serving as a natural campus gateway for the USM community.

Portland Commons offers 580 beds in 385 units, including single-occupancy rooms, studio apartments, and larger multi-bedroom units. The four wings of the hall — two reaching five stories and two reaching eight stories — form a parallelogram that encloses a half-acre semi-private residential courtyard. Wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass, the angular corner above the lower Bedford Street wing allows unparalleled views of the peninsula skyline and Back Cove. On track for Passive House Certification, Portland Commons is the second largest Passive House building at a university in the United States and is a top-10 largest Passive House building anywhere in the country. It is projected to use less than half the energy of a standard modern building.

The McGoldrick Center celebrates Portland’s maritime industry and the State’s forestry industry with diagonal mass timber framing, a corrugated metal façade, an interior stone fireplace and natural stained wood. It is pursuing LEED Gold certification and features a 270-seat dining space with café, a 140-seat multi-purpose event room, student lounges, office space, a career counseling center, a bookstore, a radio station, and a large, roof-top solar photovoltaic array.