When Portland International Airport’s $2.15 billion expansion opens Wednesday, guests will begin checking bags and heading for boarding gates within a terminal unlike any other in the country.
Passengers at Oregon’s largest airport will walk beneath a rippling 9-acre lattice ceiling and thick glulam beams that total 2.6 million board feet of Douglas fir, much of it harvested by tribal loggers and sustainable foresters from Washington state.
It’s a showcase of the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest: our vast forests. And in a world grappling with the consequences of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, it’s also a glimpse of what is possible using “mass timber” — layered lumber that’s stronger than steel, lighter than concrete and capable of capturing carbon.
But this ambitious effort by the Port of Portland has no such parallel in Seattle — yet.
“We don’t have a big demonstration project — and that’s a bummer,” says Susan Jones, a preeminent Seattle mass timber architect who has toured the new terminal. “Seattle, a hub of this new industry, should be the place where we make a big statement with it.”
It’s high time elected leaders around Puget Sound went out on a limb building with this stuff. Plenty of opportunities, including six World Cup games coming to Seattle in 2026, lie ahead to map out a big infrastructure project here showing off mass timber harvested in the Northwest. The result could inspire its increased use in construction, speeding along development of greener buildings that can embody carbon, in a region desperate for more housing.
But before I get accused of copycatting Portland, know this: Mass timber projects are cropping up all over the world, a renewable response to climate change bringing a natural look to cities. Anyone watching water polo or diving at the Olympics in Paris might’ve noted the undulating wooden roof of the Aquatics Center at Saint-Denis, for example. The Port of Portland’s ultimate contribution — and one that leaders in Seattle should emulate — is the way it sourced, and ultimately honored, the timber and its harvesters in this region.
In a commoditized industry built for efficiency, knowing where finished lumber comes from throughout an intricate supply chain — logger, trucker, mill, wholesaler and retailer — is next to impossible. The PDX Next project, as it’s known, helped break that mold. The port, through its contractors, went directly to forest owners: a nature conservancy in Cle Elum, public forest in Roslyn and tribal forest managed by the Skokomish Tribe, whose harvesters thinned 143 acres to increase forest health and fire resilience while providing wood for the airport project, to name a few.
Think “farm to table,” but for timber.
The Yakama Nation was a prime contributor. The tribe, which thins 480,000 acres to keep its forestland healthy in the face of wildfire and disease, takes out the weakest trees and leaves behind the best — a sustainable approach that mimics prescribed burns the tribe has performed for thousands of years. Clear-cutting this is not. It has also created a vital economic resource for the tribe. But for the first time, their final product’s origin story will be on display for every traveler to see at Portland’s airport.
“We take great pride in that,” said Cristy J. Fiander, resource manager for Yakama Forest Products.
So while the grand timber display in Portland is an added benefit, the long-term gain may be this: a coalescence of everyone from architects to foresters in a mammoth display of what is possible — to put Northwest trees in a Northwest building. That success can be replicated.
The 1 million-square-foot Portland terminal, paid for largely by airlines that use the Port of Portland facility, is modeled to make you feel like you’re taking a walk in the woods. Imagine if the stress of traversing TSA security is blunted by nature — wooden beams overhead, skylights shining down, some of the 5,000 living trees in view. Even the wooden hut for additional private security screening resembles something akin to a Finnish sauna.
“All designed to ease tension and stress,” Vince Granato, the port’s chief projects officer, told me as we stood underneath the eyelash-shaped lattices of the massive wooden ceiling in late July.
The building does use some steel — a spine of Y beams supports a total of 3.5 million board feet making up its wooden roof. Its exterior walls are mostly glass. Nearly all the rest? Northwest timber, sourced 300 miles or less from PDX.
None of this is to say the Puget Sound region has been devoid of mass timber projects, both public and private. Glued beams have held up the Tacoma Dome since 1982. Many school projects, including the rebuild of Seattle’s Asa Mercer Middle School, are including the biophilic benefits of cross-laminated timber, a kind of mass timber. And more such apartments and condos, now that new building codes allow them to ascend 18 stories in Seattle, are in planning.
Of recent public infrastructure constructed here, much contains the prominent use of wood — the sprawling Hillclimb staircase of the expanded convention center, new portions of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and the vanguard of sustainability that is the Bullitt Center, to name a few. Yet none can match the structural size and scope of Portland’s new terminal and its traceable wood sourcing.
Even what is built in Seattle won’t be as impressive under existing building codes in the U.S. Case in point: Architect Jones’ latest mass timber project, Heartwood, is eight stories and 126 units of affordable housing on Capitol Hill. Its wood exterior is covered by a fiber-cement facade because the exterior must be “noncombustible” — this despite testing showing mass timber is equally fire resistant as many other materials, Jones said. That’s a shame.
A big Seattle public project with mass timber — a part of the World Cup games or within King County’s plans for a new civic center, say — could help inspire and expedite public and private projects using it. Some of mass timber’s benefits — it can be prefabricated off-site, for simpler and faster construction on-site — won’t happen until more developers are more comfortable incorporating it into projects. More wood needs to be seen.
“The vision is so clear,” Jones said. “Once people see it, they’ll start demanding it.”
As a building material, mass timber’s rise is no license to increase harvests of the Northwest’s forests. But as the Portland airport project proves, there’s a way within forestry to ensure the woods that are sustainably harvested become our public places — for the good of the planet, affordable housing supply and more.
It’s ultimately the forests that built much of our built environment; it’s the trees that make Washington the Evergreen State. Let’s use our home-field advantage, keep our forests evergreen and make our cities greener, too. Building a bold project with mass timber could be the kick-start we need to solve a variety of knotty Northwest problems.
Source: Seattle Times