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Concise title

Portland International Airport is becoming an American showcase for mass timber, biophilic design and earthquake-ready engineering.

Executive summary

Portland International Airport (PDX), in Oregon, has completed the first phase of a modernization costing more than $2 billion—the largest public-works project in the state. The new terminal aims to move beyond the functional but unremarkable image of many American airports by drawing directly on Pacific Northwest forests. Its vast local mass-timber roof, thousands of plants and natural light create a calmer, more distinctive passenger experience. The build also presented a major logistics challenge: the airport stayed open, handling roughly 500 daily flights throughout the work.

Key points

• The original 1956 terminal had grown into 11 buildings with inconsistent structures and seismic codes, making change increasingly difficult.
• The renovation is intended to expand PDX substantially, with a target of up to 35 million passengers a year by 2045.
• The new roof covers almost nine acres and uses 600,000 board feet of Douglas fir from 11 forests within 300 miles of the airport.
• It took six years to organize the timber supply chain, prioritizing local materials and expertise.
• The biophilic approach includes more than 5,000 plants, mature trees and 49 skylights to bring Oregon’s natural environment into the terminal.
• The roof was prefabricated in three giant sections—some weighing more than 600 tonnes—and moved at night across 1.6 km of an operating airport.
• In an active seismic region, the terminal uses friction-pendulum isolators that allow the roof to move as much as 56 cm during a major earthquake.

Takeaway

PDX shows that an airport can be welcoming, rooted in its territory and designed to reduce environmental impact without compromising technical constraints. Its second phase, expected in late 2025, adds shops, restaurants and waiting areas while completing the transformation.

Audience

This video is for architecture, engineering and major-infrastructure enthusiasts, as well as travelers curious about the future of airports. It is particularly relevant to professionals and students interested in sustainable construction, mass timber and seismic design.

An airport can be efficient without being memorable. It can move millions of passengers, multiply security checks and line up boarding gates without ever making anyone want to spend one extra minute there. Portland International Airport—better known as PDX—takes the opposite approach.

With its vast timber ceiling, thousands of plants and natural light, Portland’s new airport is not only trying to make travel flow better. It wants passengers to feel Oregon from their first minutes inside. The result feels less like a conventional terminal than a walk beneath a canopy, combining biophilic design, seismic engineering and an extraordinary construction project.

This transformation is far more than a cosmetic renovation. PDX has become a case study for American airports: a place that can be beautiful, local, resilient and designed around travelers.

A Portland airport held back by its own history

Portland International Airport was not a bad airport. It was even one of the better-regarded American airports for accessibility and for being less stressful than major national hubs. But its main terminal dated from 1956, and nearly seventy years of additions had made each new evolution more difficult.

Over time, the site spread across eleven separate buildings. Each part followed different structural and seismic standards. Modernizing security, enlarging spaces or changing passenger flows had become a technical puzzle.

The modernization, estimated at more than $2 billion, therefore had to solve several problems at once:

• replace aging infrastructure;
• increase airport capacity;
• improve passenger journeys;
• keep air operations running during the work;
• create an identifiable terminal rooted in Portland and Oregon.

Local timber at the center of PDX’s new terminal

The first striking image inside the new terminal is its ceiling. A huge timber lattice covers roughly nine acres—more than 36,000 m². It gives the building unusual depth and turns a check-in area into something close to a landscape.

That monumental ceiling uses nearly 600,000 board feet of Douglas fir, an emblematic Pacific Northwest species. The material came from eleven forests within about 300 miles of the airport.

The local choice was not incidental. It took around six years to build a supply chain able to provide the necessary timber. At a time when major projects often source the cheapest material from the other side of the world, Portland prioritized a regional resource and the know-how around it.

Building a terminal without closing the airport

The project’s beauty conceals a much harder reality: PDX remained open throughout construction. The airport had to keep handling about 500 flights a day while much of its terminal was demolished, rebuilt and reorganized.

The roof presented an even more spectacular challenge. Rather than build it entirely above an active terminal, teams prefabricated it on part of the airfield converted into a work zone. The structure was assembled in three giant sections made of 18 elements.

Each element weighed between 270,000 and 635,000 kilograms. The largest measured more than 40 by 60 metres. The sections then moved about a mile at around 1 mph, limiting disruption to the terminal and protecting timber from bad weather.

A giant roof designed for earthquakes

PDX’s new roof was designed to move in a controlled way. It sits on Y-shaped columns with friction-pendulum isolators. Those devices allow the structure to shift in an earthquake while absorbing part of the forces; the roof can move by up to roughly 56 centimetres.

PDX achieves an unusual balance: architecture that looks light, yet an infrastructure designed to absorb extreme constraints.

PDX: a model for a new generation of American airports?

Its terminal combines a large timber structure, abundant planting, carefully integrated daylight and earthquake-ready engineering. More importantly, it proves that an ambitious renovation can happen on a living site without shutting the airport down.

PDX will not solve delays, security checks or the unpredictability of air travel. But it makes waiting less painful and offers an intriguing direction for airport architecture: more local, more human and more sustainable places.