Part Two: Novel and Experimental Design Approaches at the New PDX Terminal

Missed Part One? Read it HERE.

The approximately $2 Billion Portland International Airport Terminal Core  Redevelopment Project, located in Portland, OR, is led by the Port of Portland  as owner, with a design team featuring ZGF Architects and KPFF as Structural  Engineer. It is currently being built by Hoffman-Skanska Joint Venture as CMGC. The project  is summarized in Part One, published in the June 2023 Structure, and features  many unique structural solutions.. In this article, we will delve deeper into some of the most interesting structural aspects of the project, including design for fire exposure, physical load testing of connections, and the herculean process of erecting the new roof.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly developing technology that is already transforming many sectors and has the potential to usher in a new paradigm. The automated production of structures is one of the potentially most impactful applications of AM, also called “3D printing.” A group of engineers and architects at Lehigh University investigated a technique called “Particle bed 3D printing by selective binder activation” to manufacture objects made of concrete. Their interests started with structural engineering and progressively expanded to include environmental impact, architecture, and topology optimization. The team also partnered with Buzzi Unicem USA Inc., an international cement producer headquartered in the Lehigh Valley (PA). Together, they are collaborating with the National Museum of Industrial History, located in the former seat of Bethlehem Steel, Pennsylvania, to showcase this technique and its potential through an exhibit. The exhibit is an opportunity to reflect on the past, present, and future of cement in Eastern Pennsylvania. This area historically has had a high density of companies in the cement sector. The PA Department of Community and Economic Development supported part of this research. Figure 1 shows a 3D printed totem, two freestanding columns and one portal frame, which are part of the exhibit. 

Pedestrian Bridge

Pedestrian bridges are a vital part of modern hospital complexes, providing weather-protected connections for patient transfer and staff connectivity. They are also a great opportunity for merging engineering creativity with architectural expression. Emory University Hospital Midtown is a large hospital in the SoNo district of Atlanta, Georgia, with an over 100-year history. 

The repurposing of One Milk Street, Boston

Located in Boston’s Historic Newspaper Row District and at the location of Benjamin Franklin’s birth, One Milk Street is composed of three connected buildings: the Boston Transcript Building (circa 1873), the Boston Post Building (circa 1874), and a reinforced concrete connector building from the 1930s (Figures 1 and 2). These three buildings, as with many mass masonry and timber buildings of this age, have had numerous modifications over their 100+ years. The current rehabilitation project encompassed a full building renovation with structural alterations to create mixed-use upper-floor offices and retail space on the ground floor. As Engineer of Record (EOR) for the renovations, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger (SGH) performed a broad range of scope including, but not limited to, evaluation of the existing structural components of the building to determine the level of code-triggered structural upgrades; development of a procedure for in-situ proof load testing of the existing heavy timber floors; and design of new structural components such as new elevator cores, egress stairs, a two-story mechanical penthouse, a new entrance canopy, and new concrete sidewalk vaults. This multifaceted project highlights the challenges inherent in structurally retrofitting 19th-century buildings.

A new mass timber concert hall takes shape in massachusetts 

The bucolic farmlands of eastern Massachusetts play host to a new music education and performance facility known as Groton Hill Music Center. Its owners, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1985, describe their new home as a “126,000-square-foot love letter to sound,” with studio classrooms for students of all ages, an orchestral rehearsal space, a 300-seat recital hall for soloists and small ensembles, and a grand 1000-seat concert hall that opens to view for a 500-seat lawn audience that is set in the surrounding outdoor fields in during supportive weather.

The seismic restoration/rehabilitation of the historic St. Mary’s in the Mountains Catholic Church, Virginia City, Nevada

Post-Disaster Observations of the Kahramanmaras Turkiye Earthquake Sequence — Part 1

Tallwood 1 at District 56 is a twelve-story mixed-use mass timber building located in Langford, British Columbia, Canada, designed by Design Build Services (DBS), Jack James Architecture, and Aspect Structural Engineers (Figure 1). Tall wood construction is a relatively new typology across North America, and this building is the first structure to be constructed under the British Columbia Building Code’s (BCBC) new Encapsulated Mass Timber Construction (EMTC) provisions, a typology that drastically reduces a building’s structural embodied carbon. EMTC is very similar in limitations and fire requirements to the 2021 IBC Type IV-B construction type. As appropriate to a novel system, the design and construction of this building presented some significant challenges and valuable lessons along the way, with one of the primary challenges being the building’s location: Langford is located in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a region that is among the highest in seismic demand in all of Canada. Tallwood 1 was the tallest steel-timber hybrid structure in Canada when it was completed in 2021.

Portland International Airport, commonly known as PDX, has been consistently voted among America’s Best Airports by Travel and Leisure Magazine’s reader poll for nearly 20 years, earning the top spot nearly every year. More than that, it is beloved by the people of Oregon and SW Washington as a home base, evidenced by the adoption of the PDX airport code as a moniker for the city itself and by the popular tradition of sharing pictures of your shoes on the iconic carpet to announce you’ve touched down and are officially home from your latest adventure. However, a master planning effort led by the Port of Portland (project owner) in 2014 identified numerous needs to meet increasing passenger demand, which was forecast to double over the coming decades. Initial studies focused on squeezing additional security, ticketing, and baggage processing capacity into the existing terminal were found to be inadequate as a long-term solution, and building a second, separate terminal was undesirable due to the worsened passenger experience of multi-terminal airports, high cost, and duplication of systems and services required. Thus, as the centerpiece of their PDX Next suite of projects, the Port of Portland elected to expand and modernize the existing terminal via the roughly $2 Billion Terminal Core Redevelopment project (TCORE), which as of this writing, is past mid-way through six years of planned construction.