Portland, Oregon’s New CLT Airport Terminal Helping Increase Interest in Mass Timber

Portland, Oregon’s new airport terminal, built with cross laminated timber (CLT), is featured in a new profile by Good News Network (11-2-23). The structure is dominated by its enormous atrium, amounting to 9 acres in area. The atrium is built with CLT made from Douglas fir, hemlock, and southern yellow pine sourced entirely from within 300 miles of its location—all from either Oregon landowners or Tribal nations.

According to Good News Network, Patrick Sisson of Fast Company says, “The process was so exacting, the architects knew every board that frames the skylights above the 26 Y-columns came from the Yakama Nation, and all the double beams in the six massive oval skylights came from the Coquille Indian Tribe.”

“The Portland project has almost created a market across the country,” Dean Lewis, director of mass timber and prefabrication for Skanska, the company that is handling construction, told Fast Company. “We’re getting calls from Atlanta and New York asking about the kinds of timber we can get within 300 miles of the city. ‘Can we do that here?’ They all want that local story.”

Along with being a beautiful place to embark and disembark, the terminal is envisioned as a huge flexing of the muscles of the American mass timber market, which internationally is mainly controlled by other countries like Sweden and Canada, according to Good News Network.