Installed in time for first snow fall on Mt. Hood, Timberline Lodge now sports an eye-catching new visitors’ entrance designed by Portland’s rhiza A+D. The graceful reticulated structure, like a snowdrift blown against the National Historic Landmark’s massive masonry facade, is assembled at the onset of each year’s snow season and disassembled the following spring, appearing and disappearing with each season’s snow.

Under light powder the illuminated portal glows like a lantern. As the winter snows accumulate the lantern morphs into a snug contemporary igloo, able to withstand the formidable snow and wind loads encountered on Mount Hood.

“The arch is a two-dimensional symbol for shelter. Spin that arch in three dimensions and you have an igloo,” says rhiza A+D partner Ean Eldred. “In its relationship to landscape, resources, and the fundamental human need for protection from the elements, the igloo is a profoundly elegant design.”

The entry is formed from a series of parabolic arches, with profiles waterjet-cut from half-inch-thick aluminum plate. Each profile is interlaced with continuously welded ribs supporting a double skin of translucent polycarbonate panels which are lightweight, durable and replaceable.

“It will be an icon next to an existing icon” said Joachim Grube, co-founder and principal of Yost Grube Hall Architecture and President of Friends of Timberline, a group dedicated to the 1937 building’s preservation. “It’s really the only design that could do justice to this venerable structure.” The new entrance joins a long legacy of craft and collaboration that is the cornerstone of Timberline Lodge.

Rhiza A+D architecture and design is located in Portland, Ore. Partners Ean Eldred, Richard Garfield, John Kashiwabara and Peter Nylen individually and collectively have provided architecture, art and design services since 1982. Rhiza A+D has realized civic, cultural, commercial and residential projects through its interdisciplinary practice of architecture, interiors, furnishings, planning, public art, art installations an performance based works. Recently completed projects include a private residence for a game designer in Bellevue Wash., urban planning for a high density retail, office and residential redevelopment utilizing automated parking, a dance performance set, a signature gateway sculpture for Portland’s Big Pipe Project and the performance “Architects Draw” for Ten Tiny Dances.