The wood is pretty, but as someone who uses this terminal, the key improvement is that they raised the ceiling and significantly increased the amount of natural light. Here's a good photo of what it looked like before: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portland_Internation...
The major functional drawback is that wayfinding for both arrivals and departures is much worse. The overall flow of foot traffic is way more confusing than say, the newer terminals at SFO.
This is Phase 1. Phase 2 will replace the rest of the terminal structure (the part that was open during Phase 1 construction) and directly connect foot traffic to the gates. The long outer walkways are temporary and their walls will be removed.
That's good to hear. I had assumed there must be more planned (partly because some parts are still boarded off) because the current walk distance from security to the gates is just awful; but it's good to hear confirmation.
In addition to the great lighting, the new design also has much improved acoustics. The sound dampening is impressive. I can have conversations without straining to pick up words through the din of echoes, and the ambience has a nice warm sense of quiet.
FAA through the National Academies did a research study a few years ago [1] to provide guidance on improving the intelligibility of PA systems and also improving the overall acoustics of airport terminals. The idea is that this guidance would be used for terminal renovations and new construction. It looks like they may have put this to use! (I was on the team but not an author of the final report).
I'm really glad that recognition of acoustics in airport design is gradually gaining steam. As a Seattle resident I'm pretty jealous of people who fly through SFO regularly, because that airport is a joy to wait in because of how quiet it is. Now apparently I get to be jealous of PDX as well.
In Holland they had those at Schiphol Airport and we were able to leave liquids in our bags and the 100ml limit was removed. But the EU ordered it to be reintroduced because they wanted the rules the same within Europe.
Edit: This previously said we could no longer keep the laptops in our bags but this part was not affected, I've amended this post to avoid confusion.
Sounds like the same scanner tech that has been deployed at some Australian airports.
Flying out of Melbourne 18 months ago and I'm getting ready to take my laptop and water bottle out. Nope, firmly told to keep it all in my bag. They still pulled me aside, but had a cool 3D model of the inside of my bag.
Of course they ruin the efficiency advantage of that by then putting us through body scanners. If you're not in the ideal BMI range the thing needs to fail three times before they ask you to grope yourself and then do a swipe/scan of your hands.
If you had TSA Precheck -- which if you fly more than a couple of times a year is well worth it IMO -- then you already didn't need to take your laptop out (or shoes off). (On the other hand I see no point in CLEAR over Precheck)
I just flew through there and saw the renovation for the first time, and it is an absolutely stunning transformation. Just incredible. I loved it. The whole thing. From the ceiling to the ticketing islands to the reworked security to the amphitheater style seating areas at the terminal exit where friends & family can await your arrival.
It feels spacious, natural, functional, and hospitable.
No, this is mostly the story of a small local airport that was dingy becoming more modern and airy. But it has nowhere near the traffic, amenities, or experience of Changi.
so do tell, which airport do you like? Or should we just ban all air travel? I don’t think you’ll get many people to agree to that so that idea is dead in the water.
And apparently private jets are of no concern! The average private citizen must suffer! lol. I’d recommend banning private jets to start…that might actually make a decent dent in air travel emissions without punishing normal travelers.
If you want to discourage air travel, tax the fuel appropriately. It’s not a hard concept. For the people that are traveling, i don’t see why it’s a problem that their experience is nice.
We drove over to PDX a few weeks back not because we had any flights, just to check it out. It's gorgeous - I can't believe I'm saying that about an airport in the US - it's just an amazing space. In addition to the architecture there are huge video walls above the TSA entrance that have calming forest/coastal scenes.
It looks beautiful. It talks about it being structural. Is it really? It looks more like a suspended ceiling below steel girders.
Our largest airport (AKL) is in the process of rebuilding both domestic and international terminals. They are trying for a timber ceiling [1] with rubber floors [1]. It seems a confused design.
> A ‘cost-effective’' mix of durable carpeted and rubber flooring was being used inside and tray profile steel on the exterior. [0]
It's a mix of steel and wood. Curved Glulam beams sits on top of massive steel trusses, which are mostly hidden from view. The steel trusses in turn sit on top of big Y columns. The roof is seismically isolated too.
Not the tallest in the world. It was surpassed by Mjøstårnet in Norway and now Ascent in Milwaukee is the tallest.
It’s not even remotely close to the height of these new buildings. It’s 26m, while the three tallest now are around 85m.
Not to say it’s not impressive anyway. I applaud all the progress that has been made in replacing concrete with wood in large buildings. We should build more buildings like that (as long as we source wood sustainably)
It's the renovated interior of a pre-existing building, so yeah: not structural, at least no more than needed to hold up its own weight. But it really is very nice.
They renovated the existing structure and expanded it as well, doubling the capacity of the airport. They did a lot of interesting work to make it earthquake proof. Check out the video, I'm pretty sure someone posted it in this discussion.
I agree it looks nice, but dressing up an airport in sustainable materials won't materially change the fact that a flight Boston - NYC (one-way!) blasts through ~0.7t[1] of CO2eq of your yearly budget of 1-3t[2]. It won't change the fact, but I'm sure it'll make it easier to forget or ignore.
The carbon emission is not a problem, the imbalance is. When we burn fossil fuels, we use carbon that was stored by dead plants being buried. We take carbon from the ground and dump it in the atmosphere. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere. If were to bury the equivalent amount of wood, we would be equal. Buried wood is not useful, but building from it also locks the carbon somewhere else that isn't an atmosphere. So... there actually is a finite number of wooden airports that completely offsets airplane carbon emissions.
1 kilo of wood sequesters (temporarily for the most part) about 2kg CO2 equivalent, so for the GP's example of a single seat one-way from Boston - NYC, you'd need to sequester 350kg of wood.
To sequester the ~800 Mt of CO2 emitted by aviation annually, you'd need to sequester about 400 billion kilograms of wood. So a finite but absurd amount.
There's a simple way to think about this that doesn't require doing a ton of research and number crunching. Think about the volume of fuel in a single airplane, about 7,000 gallons for a 737, or about 100 55 gallon drums. It's nowhere near exact, but you can roughly equate that volume of fuel to the volume of volume of wood to compare carbon - I'm pretty sure this is being very generous to the energy density of the wood, but it gives you an upper limit on what the wood could be sequestering (I think in reality jet fuel is something like 2-3x as energy/carbon dense per m^3). Now think about how many planes take off every day from an airport, and the volume of n*100 drums.
It's just nowhere near in reality, and we're not going to make a large dent via sequestration, the "finite" airports is functionally infinite for our purposes. We have to start making carbon neutral fuel.
That said, manufacturing concrete is incredibly carbon intensive, so avoiding making the amount we would've needed for this building is a pretty good win.
> If were to bury the equivalent amount of wood, we would be equal.
Burying wood that would have taken decades to decay is not equal to instantly releasing the equivalent amount of carbon. I'm not sure it's physically possible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate a plane emits it, which would be the only way to genuinely "offset" the emissions.
Does burying wood actually work? I'm assuming it's a little more complicated than literally burying it, cause wouldn't it decay and release carbon at some point anyway?
It looks like Skanska is GC for the Project, and cites it as a 9 acre (!) lumber roofing system[SK], and that it uses 3.5M board foot of Douglas Fir Project Lumber[PL].
Douglas Fir is 3.2 pounds per board foot, or 1.45kg [DFM]. So 1.45 * 3.5M = 5Mkg of lumber for PDX airport.
DF has an Embodied CO2 of 1.6kgCO2/kgLumber [DFC]. A little hard to believe? But maybe that's bc a lot of the mass of a tree is left in the ground. Worth following up.
1.6kgCO2/kgLumber * 5MkgLumber = 8MkgCO2 = 8KtCO2 embodiment/sequestration from the PDX roof project. (tho there's a lot more to the project that probably goes in the other direction)
Global CO2 emissions from commercial flights is ~60MtCO2/month [CF], so we need roughly 12,000 airports per month, 144,000/yr, to offset flight CO2 emissions.
There's 9000 commercial airline airports [NA] (tho obv many smaller than PDX, but they would also represent less CO2 from their flights), so 144,000/9000 is a 16x annual airport rebuild rate we'd need to offset CO2 emissions from the flights they service.
So yeah, this is absurd on the face of it.
But, how much of the mass of an airport is the roof? If it's like 1/100th the total mass, and you start building airports with all wood (foundation, runways, etc) you'd get to 16% annual rebuild rate to offset flight emissions. Still too high to be plausible. But another 10x somehow and you get to ~1% range of annual airport rebuild rate to offset emissions.
Sadly, it's true. In my opinion, this is the hypocrisy of the modern 'green' agenda - we endlessly discuss pollution, yet we cling to the comforts of modern life, many of which cause even greater harm.
Personally I'd love to take more trains instead of planes, and bike more instead of driving, but the system (at least in the US) just isn't set up for that.
Train travel is expensive and sparse and slow, biking most places is uncomfortable and unsafe due to crappy infrastructure.
Modern comforts like electricity, cars, heating, and cooling. Those are most of the CO2 that people produce.
It is dumb to give up modern comforts when we know how to make them green by making electricity renewable and electrifying everything. Changing habits like reducing driving and increasing transit would help. Some things will be hard, like airplanes and concrete.
I agree somewhat that there is lots of distractions. There is a lot of talk about plastic and recycling that really has little to do with climate change.
We can have it both ways. In ~50 years in the US, 99% of cars will be electric and 99% of electricity generation will be carbon negative. We can keep our comforts of modern life, like cars, while not damaging the planet.
I accept there is not a story for air travel, yet.
Not to mention, besides the wood material being, well, wood... it's a relatively small amount when you think about it, and the amount of processing involved which basically turn it into a different material altogether outweighs any sustainability. Plus, with all the glues / epoxies / whatever they use, that wood-based material isn't going to be degradable at all. It puts me in mind of "bamboo" products, which also relies on a lot of glues and processing to make it a wood analog.
> Plus, with all the glues / epoxies / whatever they use, that wood-based material isn't going to be degradable at all.
That's kinda the point though. You don't want it degrading in situ. That's why we treat wood.
In a situation indoors like here it will suffer less but still.. I used to live in a wooden house and the maintenance was a PITA. Having to repaint every 5 years or so. And that was wood that was treated already.
It boggles my mind why the US doesn't simply offer high-speed trains for easy distances like those.
That whole Northeast is just screaming for it with easily managable distances. Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC.. All easily high-speed-trainable. Boston to Portland too, for that matter.
Instead of spending 1 hour queueing at the airport, spend one hour on the train and you're there.
Flying has been the preferred travel mode of both the well-to-do and the aspirational for over half a century. Air travel only needs working airplanes, and a relatively simple airport at each end. So, in general, there's ample social pressure to get the job done quickly.
Vs. high-speed trains went out of fashion (in America) well before most people's memories. And their tracks have to be threaded, foot-by-foot, across a landscape which is overflowing with red tape and jurisdictions and NIMBY's and existing infrastructure. Said threading to be planned by yet more politicians and bureaucrats and planners, then done by America's low-functioning construction industry.
Nations with good high-speed rail systems have quite different priorities and local governance structures than America.
To put it in context: Cascades is popular because it magically takes the same amount of time (~3 hours), has no traffic, costs less than a tank of gas, and puts you into downtown seattle without having to park and potentially have your car stolen.
That is to say.. people will take trains as long as they're truthfully better. We should work on making them better. Even the lovely people of Portland, as concerned as we are about the environment, don't take the train out of the goodness of their hearts.
the same people telling me to save on my carbon emission are the ones who are ok with free trade to have stuff made thousands of miles away (in jurisdictions with very lax environmental laws) that could be made right here and employ blue-collar workers. Those container ships arrive full and leave empty. What's the CO2eq of that?
Cargo ships are the most efficient form of transport. They use scale of big ships carrying lots of cargo.
It takes about the same amount of CO2 to carry container across the Pacific as to truck it across the country. Producing it here or there doesn't make much difference. If anything, it is more efficient to produce in China cause they have higher percent of renewable electricity.
I think it's a little bit misleading to casually drop a "yearly budget" like this, as if this is something we're currently following. In the US the average car emits 4.6t of CO2 per year [1]. If you really think we need to be following this yearly budget the implications on our society (including basically a ban on most car trips being currently taken) are extremely drastic.
Yes, the new terminal in Bengaluru is BEAUTIFUL! I was amazed walking through it with how lush it was. Really love that look and very fitting for the climate (more or less)
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The major functional drawback is that wayfinding for both arrivals and departures is much worse. The overall flow of foot traffic is way more confusing than say, the newer terminals at SFO.
https://crp.trb.org/acrpwebresource2/improving-intelligibili...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_International_Airport...
> She also said that the Port of Portland "understand[s] that people have an emotional connection to the carpet".
Not a phrase I expected to read today.
Let's start from the fact that people never asked for TSA. It was imposed on them and never went away.
In Holland they had those at Schiphol Airport and we were able to leave liquids in our bags and the 100ml limit was removed. But the EU ordered it to be reintroduced because they wanted the rules the same within Europe.
Edit: This previously said we could no longer keep the laptops in our bags but this part was not affected, I've amended this post to avoid confusion.
Flying out of Melbourne 18 months ago and I'm getting ready to take my laptop and water bottle out. Nope, firmly told to keep it all in my bag. They still pulled me aside, but had a cool 3D model of the inside of my bag.
Of course they ruin the efficiency advantage of that by then putting us through body scanners. If you're not in the ideal BMI range the thing needs to fail three times before they ask you to grope yourself and then do a swipe/scan of your hands.
I assumed they would have detached any signange hanging from the ceiling before lifting it. The text would be too small to read otherwise.
On the bright side, they used timber for almost all of the construction here which is effectively a “carbon sink”, which is unusual for an airport.
Much better now.
It feels spacious, natural, functional, and hospitable.
There's looottts of the 2015 carpet as well.
If we want to solve the climate crisis, this is everything an airport should not be.
And apparently private jets are of no concern! The average private citizen must suffer! lol. I’d recommend banning private jets to start…that might actually make a decent dent in air travel emissions without punishing normal travelers.
If you want to discourage air travel, tax the fuel appropriately. It’s not a hard concept. For the people that are traveling, i don’t see why it’s a problem that their experience is nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRAkjoUdN_I
Pretty impressive how they pulled it off while minimizing impact on airport operations.
Our largest airport (AKL) is in the process of rebuilding both domestic and international terminals. They are trying for a timber ceiling [1] with rubber floors [1]. It seems a confused design.
> A ‘cost-effective’' mix of durable carpeted and rubber flooring was being used inside and tray profile steel on the exterior. [0]
It can't be any worse than our current airport.
[1] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/companies/airlines/first...
This has more information about the structure including diagrams:
https://www.zgf.com/work/5683-port-of-portland-pdx-airport-m...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon12
It’s not even remotely close to the height of these new buildings. It’s 26m, while the three tallest now are around 85m.
Not to say it’s not impressive anyway. I applaud all the progress that has been made in replacing concrete with wood in large buildings. We should build more buildings like that (as long as we source wood sustainably)
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[1] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=75775...
[2] e.g. https://ieep.eu/publications/carbon-inequality-in-2030-per-c...
To sequester the ~800 Mt of CO2 emitted by aviation annually, you'd need to sequester about 400 billion kilograms of wood. So a finite but absurd amount.
It's just nowhere near in reality, and we're not going to make a large dent via sequestration, the "finite" airports is functionally infinite for our purposes. We have to start making carbon neutral fuel.
That said, manufacturing concrete is incredibly carbon intensive, so avoiding making the amount we would've needed for this building is a pretty good win.
Burying wood that would have taken decades to decay is not equal to instantly releasing the equivalent amount of carbon. I'm not sure it's physically possible to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at the same rate a plane emits it, which would be the only way to genuinely "offset" the emissions.
It looks like Skanska is GC for the Project, and cites it as a 9 acre (!) lumber roofing system[SK], and that it uses 3.5M board foot of Douglas Fir Project Lumber[PL].
Douglas Fir is 3.2 pounds per board foot, or 1.45kg [DFM]. So 1.45 * 3.5M = 5Mkg of lumber for PDX airport.
DF has an Embodied CO2 of 1.6kgCO2/kgLumber [DFC]. A little hard to believe? But maybe that's bc a lot of the mass of a tree is left in the ground. Worth following up.
1.6kgCO2/kgLumber * 5MkgLumber = 8MkgCO2 = 8KtCO2 embodiment/sequestration from the PDX roof project. (tho there's a lot more to the project that probably goes in the other direction)
Global CO2 emissions from commercial flights is ~60MtCO2/month [CF], so we need roughly 12,000 airports per month, 144,000/yr, to offset flight CO2 emissions.
There's 9000 commercial airline airports [NA] (tho obv many smaller than PDX, but they would also represent less CO2 from their flights), so 144,000/9000 is a 16x annual airport rebuild rate we'd need to offset CO2 emissions from the flights they service.
So yeah, this is absurd on the face of it.
But, how much of the mass of an airport is the roof? If it's like 1/100th the total mass, and you start building airports with all wood (foundation, runways, etc) you'd get to 16% annual rebuild rate to offset flight emissions. Still too high to be plausible. But another 10x somehow and you get to ~1% range of annual airport rebuild rate to offset emissions.
Then you'd have something.
[SK] https://www.usa.skanska.com/what-we-deliver/projects/278172/...
[PL] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnoseid/2024/08/19/portlands-...
[DFM] https://www.globalwood.org/tech/tech_wood_weights.htm
[DFC] https://www.douglasfir.co.nz/net/environment/carbon-footprin...
[CF] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1500409/global-aviation-...
[NA] https://sentinel-aviation.com/blog/over-40000-airports-in-th...
Train travel is expensive and sparse and slow, biking most places is uncomfortable and unsafe due to crappy infrastructure.
It is dumb to give up modern comforts when we know how to make them green by making electricity renewable and electrifying everything. Changing habits like reducing driving and increasing transit would help. Some things will be hard, like airplanes and concrete.
I agree somewhat that there is lots of distractions. There is a lot of talk about plastic and recycling that really has little to do with climate change.
I accept there is not a story for air travel, yet.
That's kinda the point though. You don't want it degrading in situ. That's why we treat wood.
In a situation indoors like here it will suffer less but still.. I used to live in a wooden house and the maintenance was a PITA. Having to repaint every 5 years or so. And that was wood that was treated already.
That whole Northeast is just screaming for it with easily managable distances. Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC.. All easily high-speed-trainable. Boston to Portland too, for that matter.
Instead of spending 1 hour queueing at the airport, spend one hour on the train and you're there.
Vs. high-speed trains went out of fashion (in America) well before most people's memories. And their tracks have to be threaded, foot-by-foot, across a landscape which is overflowing with red tape and jurisdictions and NIMBY's and existing infrastructure. Said threading to be planned by yet more politicians and bureaucrats and planners, then done by America's low-functioning construction industry.
Nations with good high-speed rail systems have quite different priorities and local governance structures than America.
It's 3000 miles! I would personally love to live in a world where you can go 200mph on a train and do it in 15 hours but I wouldn't call it easy.
Amtrak Cascades is very popular for trips to Seattle.
That is to say.. people will take trains as long as they're truthfully better. We should work on making them better. Even the lovely people of Portland, as concerned as we are about the environment, don't take the train out of the goodness of their hearts.
It takes about the same amount of CO2 to carry container across the Pacific as to truck it across the country. Producing it here or there doesn't make much difference. If anything, it is more efficient to produce in China cause they have higher percent of renewable electricity.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t....
https://celebrityprivatejettracker.com/leaderboard/#gr
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