On any clear day in Portland, Oregon, the view to the east reveals 11,000-ft. Mount Hood, a dormant volcano looming on the skyline. From Portland, the road to Mount Hood is a serpentine ribbon that winds between dense strands of Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine and hemlock. Occasional breaks in the trees open to the sculpted facets of ice and rock on the rough ridges of the mountain. There, slightly more than halfway up the mountainside between the last line of trees and the open snow fields, is a National Historic Landmark called Timberline Lodge.
Timberline Lodge is the only government-owned and sponsored building of its type in America today. Its designers wanted to create an American-Alpine style with a distinct regional identity, so they furnished the building almost entirely with indigenous materials – locally quarried stone, native species of fir and pine, hand-woven fabrics, forged iron – and craft objects characteristic of the 1930’s. (The lodge still contains hundreds of original craft pieces.)
With an architectural character regarded simply as “Cascadian” – a reference to the mountain range that includes Mount Hood – Timberline Lodge was built almost entirely by hand in the depths of the Great Depression, from 1935 – 1937. Timberline also represented a remarkable collaboration of individuals and agencies: It was proposed by private citizens, funded by Congress, organized and engineered under the auspices of the United States Forest Service and built by workers hired by the Works Project Administration (WPA).
