Portland airport grows with expansive mass timber roof canopy

Ah! I thought it was done, but that makes more sense now that I looked at https://www.pdxnext.com/Stories/Details/main-terminal-openin...

That's good to hear. I had assumed there must be more planned (partly because some parts are still boarded off) because the current walk distance from security to the gates is just awful; but it's good to hear confirmation.

Sounds like the same scanner tech that has been deployed at some Australian airports.

Flying out of Melbourne 18 months ago and I'm getting ready to take my laptop and water bottle out. Nope, firmly told to keep it all in my bag. They still pulled me aside, but had a cool 3D model of the inside of my bag.

Of course they ruin the efficiency advantage of that by then putting us through body scanners. If you're not in the ideal BMI range the thing needs to fail three times before they ask you to grope yourself and then do a swipe/scan of your hands.

You're lucky you get to use those.

In Holland they had those at Schiphol Airport and we were able to leave liquids in our bags and the 100ml limit was removed. But the EU ordered it to be reintroduced because they wanted the rules the same within Europe.

Edit: This previously said we could no longer keep the laptops in our bags but this part was not affected, I've amended this post to avoid confusion.

> people don't pay attention

Let's start from the fact that people never asked for TSA. It was imposed on them and never went away.

They're back to making me take my belt off, though. I had purchased a belt with a plastic buckle specifically for this purpose...

If you had TSA Precheck -- which if you fly more than a couple of times a year is well worth it IMO -- then you already didn't need to take your laptop out (or shoes off). (On the other hand I see no point in CLEAR over Precheck)

The old carpet was replaced but the renovations are planning to lay out new carpeting with the original design, according to the Wiki article.

Wow. That is an impressive rabbit hole to explore.

> She also said that the Port of Portland "understand[s] that people have an emotional connection to the carpet".

Not a phrase I expected to read today.

It's new carpet but with that same design.

That wiki article reads much like a press release that I'm surprised that it has been allowed by the edit police

Portland has pretty mild weather. Probably not much.

society should have _some_ nice things, not everything needs to be cost optimized to the extreme with a microscope. :)

On the bright side, they used timber for almost all of the construction here which is effectively a “carbon sink”, which is unusual for an airport.

FAA through the National Academies did a research study a few years ago [1] to provide guidance on improving the intelligibility of PA systems and also improving the overall acoustics of airport terminals. The idea is that this guidance would be used for terminal renovations and new construction. It looks like they may have put this to use! (I was on the team but not an author of the final report).

https://crp.trb.org/acrpwebresource2/improving-intelligibili...

I'm really glad that recognition of acoustics in airport design is gradually gaining steam. As a Seattle resident I'm pretty jealous of people who fly through SFO regularly, because that airport is a joy to wait in because of how quiet it is. Now apparently I get to be jealous of PDX as well.

That went away years ago

They recreated some. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2024/04/pdxs-beloved-tea...

There's looottts of the 2015 carpet as well.

I saw some up on that upper level near the top of the stadium seating.

A small sliver of it is on my table as a coaster. Love that quirky design, blue green color.

Such a notable carpet it even has its own wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_International_Airport...

The carpeted walkways have it (it's new, but that same iconic design)

Probably not, but Portland OR is also a much smaller city.

No, this is mostly the story of a small local airport that was dingy becoming more modern and airy. But it has nowhere near the traffic, amenities, or experience of Changi.

Given the smaller size and fact that you can smoke weed, it's better

Is there any room for ornamentation in your view then? I'm afraid that your cause is dead in the water with that perspective.

How should it be? Are you thinking it would be outside in the elements? Or is there a building type/design that you're thinking of?

How does a cramped, artificial, non-functional airport solve the climate crisis?

If we want to solve climate, we should invest in nuclear, but those who want to 'solve climate' don't seem to care, so here we are

so do tell, which airport do you like? Or should we just ban all air travel? I don’t think you’ll get many people to agree to that so that idea is dead in the water.

And apparently private jets are of no concern! The average private citizen must suffer! lol. I’d recommend banning private jets to start…that might actually make a decent dent in air travel emissions without punishing normal travelers.

If you want to discourage air travel, tax the fuel appropriately. It’s not a hard concept. For the people that are traveling, i don’t see why it’s a problem that their experience is nice.

They renovated the existing structure and expanded it as well, doubling the capacity of the airport. They did a lot of interesting work to make it earthquake proof. Check out the video, I'm pretty sure someone posted it in this discussion.

Not the tallest in the world. It was surpassed by Mjøstårnet in Norway and now Ascent in Milwaukee is the tallest.

It’s not even remotely close to the height of these new buildings. It’s 26m, while the three tallest now are around 85m.

Not to say it’s not impressive anyway. I applaud all the progress that has been made in replacing concrete with wood in large buildings. We should build more buildings like that (as long as we source wood sustainably)

Well the fact that it doesn't degrade means the carbon stays trapped.

> Plus, with all the glues / epoxies / whatever they use, that wood-based material isn't going to be degradable at all.

That's kinda the point though. You don't want it degrading in situ. That's why we treat wood.

In a situation indoors like here it will suffer less but still.. I used to live in a wooden house and the maintenance was a PITA. Having to repaint every 5 years or so. And that was wood that was treated already.

Personally I'd love to take more trains instead of planes, and bike more instead of driving, but the system (at least in the US) just isn't set up for that.

Train travel is expensive and sparse and slow, biking most places is uncomfortable and unsafe due to crappy infrastructure.

Isn't clinging to the comforts of modern life worth heating the planet a bit? It doesn't seem like an unreasonable tradeoff to me.

We can have it both ways. In ~50 years in the US, 99% of cars will be electric and 99% of electricity generation will be carbon negative. We can keep our comforts of modern life, like cars, while not damaging the planet.

I accept there is not a story for air travel, yet.

Modern comforts like electricity, cars, heating, and cooling. Those are most of the CO2 that people produce.

It is dumb to give up modern comforts when we know how to make them green by making electricity renewable and electrifying everything. Changing habits like reducing driving and increasing transit would help. Some things will be hard, like airplanes and concrete.

I agree somewhat that there is lots of distractions. There is a lot of talk about plastic and recycling that really has little to do with climate change.

1 kilo of wood sequesters (temporarily for the most part) about 2kg CO2 equivalent, so for the GP's example of a single seat one-way from Boston - NYC, you'd need to sequester 350kg of wood.

To sequester the ~800 Mt of CO2 emitted by aviation annually, you'd need to sequester about 400 billion kilograms of wood. So a finite but absurd amount.

Interesting point!

It looks like Skanska is GC for the Project, and cites it as a 9 acre (!) lumber roofing system[SK], and that it uses 3.5M board foot of Douglas Fir Project Lumber[PL].

Douglas Fir is 3.2 pounds per board foot, or 1.45kg [DFM]. So 1.45 * 3.5M = 5Mkg of lumber for PDX airport.

DF has an Embodied CO2 of 1.6kgCO2/kgLumber [DFC]. A little hard to believe? But maybe that's bc a lot of the mass of a tree is left in the ground. Worth following up.

1.6kgCO2/kgLumber * 5MkgLumber = 8MkgCO2 = 8KtCO2 embodiment/sequestration from the PDX roof project. (tho there's a lot more to the project that probably goes in the other direction)

Global CO2 emissions from commercial flights is ~60MtCO2/month [CF], so we need roughly 12,000 airports per month, 144,000/yr, to offset flight CO2 emissions.

There's 9000 commercial airline airports [NA] (tho obv many smaller than PDX, but they would also represent less CO2 from their flights), so 144,000/9000 is a 16x annual airport rebuild rate we'd need to offset CO2 emissions from the flights they service.

So yeah, this is absurd on the face of it.

But, how much of the mass of an airport is the roof? If it's like 1/100th the total mass, and you start building airports with all wood (foundation, runways, etc) you'd get to 16% annual rebuild rate to offset flight emissions. Still too high to be plausible. But another 10x somehow and you get to ~1% range of annual airport rebuild rate to offset emissions.

Then you'd have something.

[SK] https://www.usa.skanska.com/what-we-deliver/projects/278172/...

[PL] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnoseid/2024/08/19/portlands-...

[DFM] https://www.globalwood.org/tech/tech_wood_weights.htm

[DFC] https://www.douglasfir.co.nz/net/environment/carbon-footprin...

[CF] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1500409/global-aviation-...

[NA] https://sentinel-aviation.com/blog/over-40000-airports-in-th...

Does burying wood actually work? I'm assuming it's a little more complicated than literally burying it, cause wouldn't it decay and release carbon at some point anyway?

There's a simple way to think about this that doesn't require doing a ton of research and number crunching. Think about the volume of fuel in a single airplane, about 7,000 gallons for a 737, or about 100 55 gallon drums. It's nowhere near exact, but you can roughly equate that volume of fuel to the volume of volume of wood to compare carbon - I'm pretty sure this is being very generous to the energy density of the wood, but it gives you an upper limit on what the wood could be sequestering (I think in reality jet fuel is something like 2-3x as energy/carbon dense per m^3). Now think about how many planes take off every day from an airport, and the volume of n*100 drums.

It's just nowhere near in reality, and we're not going to make a large dent via sequestration, the "finite" airports is functionally infinite for our purposes. We have to start making carbon neutral fuel.

That said, manufacturing concrete is incredibly carbon intensive, so avoiding making the amount we would've needed for this building is a pretty good win.

> If were to bury the equivalent amount of wood, we would be equal.

Burying wood that would have taken decades to decay is not equal to instantly releasing the equivalent amount of carbon. I'm not sure it's physically possible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate a plane emits it, which would be the only way to genuinely "offset" the emissions.

Sometimes, dressing up a problem can breed apathy and desensitize people to harsh realities.

It’s being planned, but projects like these are never certain: https://secretnyc.co/high-speed-train-nyc-to-boston/

Flying has been the preferred travel mode of both the well-to-do and the aspirational for over half a century. Air travel only needs working airplanes, and a relatively simple airport at each end. So, in general, there's ample social pressure to get the job done quickly.

Vs. high-speed trains went out of fashion (in America) well before most people's memories. And their tracks have to be threaded, foot-by-foot, across a landscape which is overflowing with red tape and jurisdictions and NIMBY's and existing infrastructure. Said threading to be planned by yet more politicians and bureaucrats and planners, then done by America's low-functioning construction industry.

Nations with good high-speed rail systems have quite different priorities and local governance structures than America.

Boston to Portland, OR? The city discussed in the article?

It's 3000 miles! I would personally love to live in a world where you can go 200mph on a train and do it in 15 hours but I wouldn't call it easy.

Those are not the same people.

Cargo ships are the most efficient form of transport. They use scale of big ships carrying lots of cargo.

It takes about the same amount of CO2 to carry container across the Pacific as to truck it across the country. Producing it here or there doesn't make much difference. If anything, it is more efficient to produce in China cause they have higher percent of renewable electricity.

To put it in context: Cascades is popular because it magically takes the same amount of time (~3 hours), has no traffic, costs less than a tank of gas, and puts you into downtown seattle without having to park and potentially have your car stolen.

That is to say.. people will take trains as long as they're truthfully better. We should work on making them better. Even the lovely people of Portland, as concerned as we are about the environment, don't take the train out of the goodness of their hearts.

You can thank former Seattle CM Sally Clark almost singlehandedly for the articulation bullshit. And a lot of the dumb townhouse rules that made them all identical for a decade.

And you know design review was created by an initiative on an off election? 15% of registered voters voted in favor.

I think design review could be overturned constitutionally. But few people seem to focus on that issue for long enough to learn how to organize around it.

> The PNW actually doesn't have these rules, although the rest of the country hasn't noticed yet.

For all our warts, I continue to believe the PNW is the best area of the country to live. I'm obviously biased. But I've lived a lot of places and I keep coming back here.

I think it’s 4 over 1 here in the Seattle area. Concrete floor one with retail followed by 4 wooden floors of apartments, although that is changing to 5 over 2 in the last few years. Developers love them because they are easier to build and maximize sellable space.

They just winked at me and gave me a stern talking to about "you know this isn't going to fly in the real world..." PDX TSA is notoriously friendly.

I suppose with such a large investment though, they'd want to plan for that possibly changing eventually, no? I'd be flying from/to Canada anyway, but if it was a viable and better option compared to others like SF, they'd get my business instead, not that there's much business to give

It's a miracle that Portland has direct international service at all. They probably had to bodge on the customs area after the place was built to pick up that route to Vancouver. Also good to keep in mind that a lot of older airports seem kludged together because they were. Fifty years ago passengers were screened at the gate. Then they invented central screening. Then they invented TSA and stopped letting non-passengers into the terminals.

Great suggestions, and ya I was aware of NEXUS but just haven't got around to it

Be real.

I appreciate the detailed answer, exactly the kind I was looking for.

Airports are starting to bring back the ability to walk around without a ticket!

You obviously still have to go through security, but a ticket isn't required.

PDX is not using LVL, they're using glulam. That's 2x4 and 2x6 dimensional lumber glued together.

https://www.apawood.org/pdx-gets-back-to-its-roots-with-engi...

O'Hare has a real problem, it was alarming to see when I was waiting at the baggage carousel.

The environment certainly cares about whether you watch Fox News or not while polluting the earth flying around in a plane

To be fair, I've been to Portland maybe 3-4 times including a few weeks ago, and this year was the first time I could actually see any of that because it wasn't raining.

There are few Brutalist buildings around PSU.

Downtown has a lot of bland fifty year old buildings. But I like them more than the complicated new ones. But downtown also still has a lot of old buildings.