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.

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.