How the Portland Airport Carpet Became a Hipster Icon

I've never been to Portland, but I've seen the airport's carpet a million times. If you asked me to draw a picture of the delightfully geometric 80s design, I could probably do it with my eyes closed. How, you wonder? Hipsters. That's how.

Hipsters just love that blue-green carpet at the Portland International Airport (PDX). The 25-year-old design has been spun off into so many clothing lines and social media accounts, you could call the PDX carpet a hipster icon. Not for long, though. Last month, airport officials began ripping up the 14 acres of stained, fraying fabric that cover the terminal floors and replacing it with a curvier new design. And the hipsters are pissed.

Over two decades before Portlandia introduced the world to the inside jokes of the Pacific Northwest paradise, Portland was a sleepy city. But it was also gearing up for a renaissance, a reinvention that would turn the old trading post in Mount Hood's shadow into a city fit for the 21st-century. To make this possible, the airport would need to get bigger.

In the 1980s, the Portland International Airport underwent a series of renovations and expansions that would eventually yield two new new concourses, moving sidewalks, and a small shopping mall. All of this new floorspace would need new carpet, so airport officials hired SRG Partnership for the job. The local architecture and design firm quietly decided to draw inspiration from the airports X-shaped runways as seen from the control tower. The dark blue, purple, and red pattern on a teal-colored background reflected the popular design trends of the time, though it hardly seemed like would become so timeless.

Workers laid 28,000 square feet of the iconic carpet throughout PDX's terminals in 1987. Jon Schleuning, the founding partner of SRG Partnership, had designed the glitchy look with the help of his colleague Laura Hill. (Hill recently wrote about the design process.) The team got lots of compliments on the design at the time of the installation, but they never expected it to develop a cult following.

But the airport expansion foreshadowed a much more ambitious plan for Portland. A year after the new carpet was glued to the floors of PDX, the city's Bureau of Planning adopted an ambitious initiative called the Central City Plan. The near 200-page plan aimed to "guide the Central City into the 21st-century" by boosting the economy and spurring smart growth. That meant preserving the Mount Hood corridor, expanding retail and office space downtown, extending the Light Rail system, and building a huge new convention center. In effect, Portland was preparing for a huge influx of visitorsand hopefully residents, too.

For a complicated set of reasons, Portland's wish came true. With the 9os came the dot com boom and a massive explosion of computer-related industries throughout the city. This meant that there were lots of jobs for young developers and, more importantly, young graphic designers. It didn't hurt that Portland's rent was cheap or that the city was surrounded by natural splendor. All things considered, Portland was one of the hottest cities of the 90s in terms of growth.

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How the Portland Airport Carpet Became a Hipster Icon