Posted Aug 12, 2024, 7:43 PM
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Moderator
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Portland
Posts: 7,575
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Two more days until the new terminal opens:
Quote:
PDX airport’s $2 billion reinvention takes flight
The designers of the Portland airport's new terminal, opening Aug. 14, create an environmentally friendly, technologically innovative space that feels like a "first walk in an Oregon forest."
On Aug. 3 visitors got a first peek at PDX airport’s new terminal, which will open for passengers on Wednesday, Aug. 14. Photo: Randy Gragg
From its earliest days, Portland’s airport—PDX International—has grounded its visitors in dynamic experiences of the local. As the first jets began to land in 1959, PDX’s homey architecture began with a new terminal opening like a front porch to a wide, ground-level view of the volcano you just flew by, or soon would.
In the ‘70s, the automobile approach—Airport Way—featured a corridor of chevron-shaped plantings of cedars spaced closer and closer as you approached the terminal. To those flying over, the design offered a landscape version of a runway, and to those speeding by in cars, it viscerally signaled drivers to slow down in a drive-by illusion of the Doppler Effect. As the trees grew over 30 feet high, the design won the American Society of Landscape Architects prestigious 25-Year Award.
When PDX’s passenger counts rose exponentially, roads widened, and parking garages grew, the Port traded in those kinds of external landscape experiences for the internal: the drop-off area’s arched glass canopy, the garage’s hanging gardens, and the Oregon Market, what was widely lauded as the first locavore airport shopping experience. Then, of course, there was the carpet: a kind of sci-fi postmodern pattern of Mondrian-esque lines and squares that didn’t so much evoke the local as create it, exemplified by the DIY t-shirts, mugs, and tattoos–and the fury over its removal.
Though many architecture firms have contributed parts to PDX, the overall experience has been shaped almost entirely by ZGF. (The 1987 carpet, FIY, was by SRG Partnership). The latest, the $2-billion new main terminal scheduled to open August 14, is a grand effort to completely reimagine what “the local” can be in the form of a nine-acre space processing as many as 250,000 people a day. In an intricate collaboration between KPFF and PAE engineers, and Hoffman Construction–partnered with global construction giant Skanska—ZGF arguably has succeeded while also arguably building the most innovative work of architecture Oregon has ever produced.
Hyperbole? In the cloudy malaise of the city’s low self-esteem these last few years, it’s hard not to want to break out the brass band for any blast of sunshine. But if you define the term “architecture” widely, encompassing sustainability, seismic resiliency, and construction logistics, the new terminal sets many important precedents. The design even purposefully sourced its materials and fabrication to maximize regional economic impact.
But before we nerd out on those features, many measurable but invisible to the eye, let’s enjoy what you can see: the light, the space, and the craftsmanship.
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...continues at Oregon Arts Watch.
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