The Tacoma Dome: A Million Board Feet of Wood
Near Tacoma, Washington
When the Tacoma Dome opened on April twenty-first, nineteen eighty-three, it was, by volume, one of the largest wood-domed structures in the world at the time, though other wooden domes built since have surpassed it in size. The dome rises one hundred fifty-two feet at its peak and encloses a floor big enough to seat twenty-three thousand people. Building it required one point six million board feet of lumber, all supplied by Weyerhaeuser, and enough concrete to lay a sidewalk seventy miles long. Total cost: forty-four million dollars.
The structural system is called the Varax system, developed by engineers from Western Wood Structures in Beaverton, Oregon. The dome is assembled from two hundred eighty-eight prefabricated triangular units, each built from glued and laminated timber beams called glulams. Each triangle weighs five thousand pounds. Together they form a self-supporting wooden hemisphere large enough to swallow several city blocks.
The first sporting event inside was the World's Toughest Rodeo in late April. One of the first major concerts was David Bowie, on August eleventh, nineteen eighty-three, during his Serious Moonlight Tour. What followed was a decade-long run that transformed Tacoma into a genuine arena-music destination: Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Diamond, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson. The Dome became the favored venue for Washington State high school sports championships, which meant that for generations of teenagers across the state, the Tacoma Dome was the biggest building they had ever stood inside.
The dome sits at the intersection of Interstate Five and Interstate Seven Oh Five, visible from the freeway as you pass through. It was built to assert that Tacoma was not just Seattle's shadow, but a city with its own cultural weight. After more than forty years, the wood still holds.
