Rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
It has already been named America's best airport for the seventh straight year. Why change it? Maybe in order to keep being named the best. Airports are always changing.
And as nice an experience as PDX may be compared to larger, more cacophonous airports, it was clear that between the front door and the entry into various concourses — that whole first half of the experience — a seismic shift was necessary.
Recently the Port of Portland unveiled a series of renderings by ZGF Architects to show the major renovation coming. It will be perhaps the biggest transformation we've seen at PDX, even bigger than the removal of that carpet everyone loved.
The Portland City Council purchased the present 700-acre PDX site in 1936 and asked the Port of Portland to sponsor a Works Progress Administration grant to develop the site. Construction of the airport steadily employed over 1,000 workers, and has been called Portland's most significant public works improvement during the New Deal era. The land they chose along the Columbia River had been frequently covered by flood waters, which required the addition four million cubic yards of sand and a series of dikes to stabilize.
Opened in 1941, it was first designated Portland–Columbia Airport to distinguish from then-operating Swan Island Airport. During World War II, the airfield was used by the United States Army Air Forces. The airport originally had a terminal on the north side of the acreage, off Marine Drive, with five runways forming an asterisk. This configuration was adequate until a new terminal and a longer, 8,800-foot (2,700 m) east–west runway were constructed in 1952.
A new terminal opened in 1959, and though it has been expanded and altered numerous times, it’s essentially the terminal we have today. With it came construction of a second east–west runway to the north, and the asterisk became taxiways. "International" was added to the airport's official designation as Swan Island closed. The PDX terminal building was renovated and expanded in 1977 and again in 1986 and 1994, when Concourses D and E were added. The Oregon Marketplace, with its restaurants and shops, was added in the former waiting areas behind the ticket counters. An expanded parking garage, new control tower, and canopy over the curbside were finished in the late 1990s, topped off (both figuratively and literally) by PDX's signature glass canopy between the parking garage and the terminal, completed in 2000.
More recently, there has been unveiled newly expanded Concourse E (designed by Hennebery Eddy Architects and Fentress) set to open next year, and a new Concourse B by ZGF Architects.
But the big Kahuna of a project is transform the airport’s core: the ticketing and lobby areas, which a new design by ZGF is poised to do. When the project is completed in 2025, they will nearly double in size. A few weeks ago, ZGF and the Port of Portland released the first renderings, and they're pretty dazzling — especially a wood and glass roof that will stretch over everything and fill the airport with light.
Rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)
To learn more about the design and the thinking behind it, recently I spoke with Sharron van der Meulen, managing partner of ZGF's Portland office, and partner Gene Sandoval.
Portland Architecture: After the pandemic people are going to be excited to travel. The new PDX won’t be ready for years, but could you talk about the meaning of travel in our lives and how that impacted the way you approached the design?
Sharron van der Meulen: It’s one of the things that we talked about in the beginning stages. How do you get back to the romance of travel, and how do you express that in a building? There’s so many people, me included, who love to go to the airport and to travel. I think it’s really exciting, the experience, and we talked a lot in the beginning about how to channel that energy, and bring excitement into every step into the passenger experience, from curbside into boarding your plane.
We have somewhat of a paradox in that PDX is already top rated by media and in surveys, yet a lot of its configuration is outdated for how we travel today: focusing restaurants and shops pre-security, using spaces for security that weren’t designed for that purpose. What was your assessment?
Gene Sandoval: Everybody loves the Portland airport. Locally and nationally. That was the tall order. How do we evolve the airport when it’s really seven or eight buildings pieced together since 1954? How do you create that airport that people love? And don’t fuck it up, right? And also, Portland has evolved. This airport is really a generational airport. We have to forecast what Portland will be in 25 and 50 years. It will be more international. It will be even more of a gateway to the Pacific.
We studied a great amount of airports, so we know where things are heading: the passenger experience, the processing, the technology. And we also saw airports far afield. The challenge is you have this big floor plate and this big roof. That allows flexibility for when things change with processing passengers and security. But Portland is this quaint, intimate airport. How do you give it that flexibility with that big roof that ties it back to the past?
Aerial rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)
One thing I’ve always noticed about Portland International Airport is that it’s quieter. There doesn’t seem to be the cacophony of noise that I associate with some big airports. Some of that is down to differences in size and passenger volume. But I’ve noticed that PDX is one of the few airports I’ve been to with carpet instead of hard-surface floors. Did your preliminary research touch upon that?
Sandoval: We were on the project for about three years before we started designing. We wanted to know what makes it. It’s the sound, it’s the finishes, it’s the natural light.
van der Meulen: You’re kind of spot-on with the concept of the carpet, but what you might find interesting is that our acoustical engineers disagree. As we have learned, sound has a general propensity to travel upward. The surfaces on the floor don’t really do anything to mitigate. But what you’re getting at is probably even more important, and that’s the psychological idea of what that feels like. When you’re walking on something underfoot that’s soft, it’s more comfortable.
What are some of your favorite airports in the world? How might they have influenced the design?
Van der Meulen: Gene’s is gonna be Hong Kong.
Sandoval: That and Madrid.
Van der Meulen: I would say Hong Kong over Madrid. There’s a reason why they’re usually one and two on lists. I think that Singapore is also amazing: completely over the top and beautiful.
Sandoval: Don’t forget Oslo. It was really the first big international airport done in wood. Hong Kong was the first modern re-interpretation of the airport in the world. It’s something a lot have used since then. Madrid was an evolution over Hong Kong. It had a cultural expression. It also has a wood ceiling. And it just feels like Madrid. And then Changi (in Singapore) because of the biophilia, the use of the natural environment and natural vegetation. It’s an airport in a garden, really.
Singapore's Changi Airport (Nat'l Geographic), Madrid's Barajas Airport (Diego Delso)
I’m curious about how the sequence of the major pieces of the experience might change in terms of layout or function: the ticket counter, the journey through security. Particularly when flying from gates on the south side of the airport, I’m aware of how dark and low-ceilinged the space is. It seems like something that could be opened up.
van der Meulen: This idea of compression is something we talked about from the beginning. It starts with the [outdoor] canopy we designed many years ago, this welcoming structure. We knew we needed to kind or re-celebrate that and look again at how that starts the experience: what it feels to enter it, to see it. And then you walk into essentially the new ticket lobby of the airport. We talked a lot: ‘Should it be compressed, should it be open?’ You get this one chance. We decided it needed to be a really tall space. But beyond that point, it gets compressed so you go through a threshold before you go into the new space we’re calling the Market Hall. It’s like the Oregon Market. It becomes open again, and you have wonderful views out to the airfield or to the apron. Then it compresses again as you go through security. It’s more quiet, and it’s a much more controlled environment, so that people don’t have to kind of deal with their stress in their environment. So it’s this kind of series of experiences of feeling very open and you’re in a large kind of space with skylights, to going into more of a compress.
With a lower ceiling, you can control the acoustics more. We all know that by far the security lane and that whole process for passengers is the most stressful. There could be a whole series of things that hold them up. And it’s all related to getting to your flight.
Speaking of which, I’ve always been curious as to how digital information could get more specific and up to date. Often when I’m picking someone up, the text I get from that person upon landing beats the airport’s own data on the TVs. Yet the question of digital information has also changed: what we used to look for from the TVs we can now retrieve instead on our phones. So how do you plan for that?
Sandoval: We always think about airports as physical spaces, but the digital experience is really tied to that. The experience of travel nowadays begins the night before you fly. You start that with your phone interface: whether you want to change seats or check in bags, then you wake up and look at your fight departure info. And a lot of things are changing. There was talk of Uber picking up your bags, for example. Every aspect, the phone could be incorporated into the process. That kind of joining of physical and digital interface is the future of flying.
van der Meulen: You’ve hit on one of the most important aspects, Gene, and that is total flexibility. You don’t know where the technology is going to take us. No one of our generation probably goes and checks in at the ticket counter, unless we have to check a bag. But believe it or not, 50 percent of the population likes to still go up to the counter and have some kind of exchange with a real person. We are caught between generations right now. As we move through the next five to ten years, we’re going to be depending on our smart phones more and more. We won’t really have to engage with too many people. Even with security: biometrics are really going to take over. Not to get into a whole Covid conversation, but that’s actually going to propel the US into pushing that technology forward.
Gene, I remember talking with you informally about the airport design in the past. You’d say something like, ‘I can’t show you yet, but wait until you see this. It’s the biggest project of my career.’ So to each of you, what about the design do you think will most get people excited? Forgive me for putting it this way, but what will be the Instagram-able moment?
van der Meulen: I think the new Instagram-able moment is really going to be the roof structure. You’ve seen the renderings, right? The inspiration came quickly but it took a long time to get it right. It’s a wood structure, obviously, and that seems like a natural for a lot of reasons—sustainability, and it’s a local resource. And we knew we wanted to celebrate that industry in a big way. I think this will be the largest project ever completed in the state of Oregon. I think every part of it needs to embody not just Oregon but the Pacific Northwest. I think people are going to be blown away by the roof structure. What they are going to see is how beautifully it’s detailed and how beautifully it interacts with natural light. It’s one thing to do a real cool form, but it’s another to work with the natural environment outside, and I think this building will do that.
Rendering of the future Portland International Airport (ZGF Architects)
Sandoval: The interior finishes are amazing. There’s a lot of inspiration. We had a conversation about Crater Lake Lodge and Timberline Lodge. It’s all about natural materials: granite, natural wood. I think this airport is going to be that way. It’s very Oregonian. It’s about the things that come from the land. So those will be the finishes. And we’ll capture a lot of natural endemic building materials.
van der Meulen: Obviously the wood roof is probably the best example of that, but there’s other ways we can tap the natural talents of this region, and whether it’s in ceramics or leather-making or other goods, we’re really trying to think about the industries in the Pacific Northwest that can contribute to a more intimate feel with building materials. This building needs to have a true Pacific Northwest story, from every level of every scale.
Sandoval: There was a lot of research, a lot of time spent to make sure they actually engaged local talent and local craftsmanship. The way the wood is made, it’s not really super high-tech. It’s diverse. It touches on many different aspects of the wood industry, around the region. Every aspect touches the building material trade. It’s bringing everybody together.
van der Meulen: It’s important because this is a public building. For the community to have a part in it, even a small part, it’s significant. This has given me a lot of ideas about how we can take this attitude and apply it to other buildings in other regions.
Sandoval: We had a big conversation about sustainability, and how it’s not just the performance of the building but actually sustaining the economic base around us. The community should have a stake in the way the money is spent. They’re going to be a part of it.
Can you talk about the process of getting input from the public and how that wove into the design?
van der Meulen: The Port of Portland orchestrated a number of charrettes, and they survey passengers on a very regular basis. We had access to the information that they collected. We also developed these passenger personas, and did some journey mapping. I think we had 12, which is a lot. It was building different scenarios. One would be a business traveler, one a travel and leisure passenger, one a kids’ sports team. We journey-mapped them through every single process to just kind of understand what were there stressors and where it made sense to have interventions to support those needs. If you look at the difference between a business traveler and a sports team, they have very different needs. Those are some of the things we did internally.
Could you talk a little bit more about the roof? Does it extend over everything?
van der Meulen: Yes, all of the things that happen in that airport. It’s over the ticket counter. It’s pretty much what you see today but it will be much more open space. A strong part of our design is the way in which we used light to assist the passenger in understanding where their next point is. I think it’s really important. We’ve got a big roof and skylights and we could have put those anywhere, but we wanted to do double or triple duty. As an example, the skylights are what we call the seam, the threshold between the ticket lobby and the Oregon market, a point in which you’re passing from one point to the next.
PDX terminal today (ZGF Architects)
What about the emotional or psychological impact that wood has?
van der Meulen: [ZGF partner Robert] Frasca used to have this simple saying about any building he was designing. To a certain point it needs to feel familiar, right? To a certain extent I think that’s what this building will do. That’s something if it were purely a steel structure just wouldn’t.
Sandoval: I think there’s a big focus on what makes it Oregon. It’s the scale, it’s a series of rooms, it’s the material in Oregon. The Portland airport was the first to incorporate a lot of wood and plants and natural daylight, going back to the 1970s, and the diversity of local: they were one of the first. Portland was first in a lot of things. And this will be one of the first to be mostly made out of wood. This can be almost like the Lewis and Clark exposition: a demonstration of how wood can be used in a modern way. It’s not just a flirtation with CLT [cross-laminated timber]. This is wood that can be supplied by big, medium and small outfits. Everybody within that industry can actually participate. Then I think you can talk about sustainability. This building is so efficient because of daylighting and mechanically and the kind of mitigations we’ve done with an efficient envelope. Then it is also seismically resilient, and that’s a big deal. Not only are we building a wood roof that’s six football fields big, but it’s seismically resilient.
I feel like a trend I’ve really seen in airport design is incorporating more plants, which ZGF’s design also seems to embrace.
van der Meulen: there’s a ton of research that tells us it’s a good idea — that it has a real impact on even how people breathe, their pulse rates. It really contributes to mitigating their overall stress. That’s an important aspect for sure. But it’s probably not the most important aspect. What we were trying to do is make it relevant to being of a place, of Oregon. What do you think of when you think of Oregon? People go, ‘I didn’t know it was so green.’ We would be remiss if we didn’t include that kind of lushness in the airport. It’s not everywhere. We were really strategic about where we placed it.
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They did not mention whether the international arrival building would be remodeled. It is a bleak place and the walk from where the shuttle van drops you off through the back of the luggage processing area is even bleaker.
Posted by: Robert Liberty | December 26, 2020 at 01:31 PM