Wood framing: an art made from ubiquity
UIC architecture team is creating this year’s US entry to Venice Biennale, a look at utilitarian ‘American Framing’
The wooden framing for houses would seem like an unlikely thing to elevate into art. It’s utilitarian and basic, the common sight of American suburbia — pine, lumber, another house going up for another family. Maybe a little hopeful if seen in that light, but otherwise about as exciting as your local Home Depot.
Wood framing will be the subject of this year’s American entry into the prestigious Venice Architecture Biennale, the global showcase for architectural thought held every other year in Italy — this summer’s a year delayed by the pandemic. The title of the U.S. Pavilion will be “American Framing,” created and curated by architects and educators Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner as part of a project now being assembled with the help of students at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The exhibit will consist of a facade, or call it an addition, in wood framing for the front of the classic U.S. Pavilion built by Delano and Aldrich in the 1930s, a sloping structure four stories high to suggest the gabled roof of an American home. Around the now-enclosed courtyard will be furniture by architects and designers Ania Jaworska, Thomas Kelley and Carrie Norman built in lumber; inside will be exhibits of photographs and models telling the stories and possibilities of the construction method.
Andersen and Preissner are willing to go one better: Framing isn’t just common, it’s “sloppy.” In a country like France, where many residential homes are made out of concrete, it’s seen as flimsy and thin. Plus what about metal framing for houses; isn’t that supposed to be the future?
Getting back to the original question, is wood framing art?
Yes, say Andersen and Preissner. It’s ubiquity and ordinariness that make it so.
“I think the attraction for us, and the reason why we thought it deserved a little bit more attention, is because on the one hand, yes, absolutely it is lowbrow,” Andersen said. “It is kind of common and ordinary and has this history of being a pragmatic solution, of being easy cheap way to build in the Midwest.”
What’s more, he said, “part of what makes it lowbrow is that the material itself is kind of crumby. The softwood lumber splinters and kind of falls apart.”
But at the same time, “all of those things that make it kind of like lowbrow also have made it really interesting in terms of its cultural connections.”
Wood frame houses go up quickly, Preissner said. You may have had the experience of “driving though a neighborhood and seeing a construction site, and then you go by two weeks later to the grocery store and there’s a house.”
Wood framing is just as quick to change. “People, when they move into a new home in the U.S., can change it and can make it their own, and that seems to be a very American thing,” Andersen said.
That change can even happen as a house is going up, allowing for architecture to be improvisational art akin to American jazz or improv comedy, Preissner said. “If you’re working within concrete, everything has been planned designed ahead of time.” With wood framing, “it’s mutable, you can use it as you want. If you don’t like where a wall is, you can move it or you can open it up.”
But most importantly, culturally speaking, wood framing is egalitarian and democratic. Builders who work with wood framing come from all cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds; one of the photo essays by Daniel Shea and Chris Strong inside the exhibit will be portraits of tradespeople and work crews. Plus, the same tools for building a woodframed house are used in the simplest homes and the most outrageous mansions; as the team writes on the project’s website at americanframing.org: “Wood framing has always been wood framing and no
amount of money can buy you a better 2x4 than the 2x4s in the poorest neighborhood in town.”
Andersen and Preissner’s project proposal, commissioned by the UIC School of Architecture, was selected in cooperation with the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in early 2020 as the U.S. entry for the Biennale. Along with being an associate professor at UIC, Preissner is the founding principal of Paul Preissner Architects of Chicago. Andersen also teaches at UIC and is the director of Denver-based Independent Architecture. The two have collaborated before, most recently on an installation at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.
“American Framing” will be on view May 22 to Nov. 21 at the delayed Venice Architecture Biennale. Work on the large pavilion facade is expected to be completed May 2.
A team of about a dozen students from UIC’s School of Architecture also have been contributing, researching wood-frame history and building models of balloonframed houses, factories, even a wood-framed doghouse, that will be shown as part of the pavilion. (Balloon framing is an older version of the building
method that creates a shell of a wood-framed house in two-by-fours.)
“We’re getting at the breadth of what you can do with wood framing,” said Jacob Patnode, who graduated with a master’s degree in architecture last May and has continued working on the project.
Summer Hofford, who will earn her degree this May, says she came to the project through doing historical research in an earlier seminar with Andersen.
Chicago was the site of what are acknowledged as the first wood-framed buildings in the world, built in the early 1800s by European settlers as adapted from earlier timber-beam construction methods. A balloon-frame warehouse built on Michigan Avenue by George Washington Snow may have been the first. The method was easy to learn and relied on plentiful softwoods and a lot of nailed-together pieces. It quickly became the common building method as America expanded westward.
Although wood framing might seem to use too many trees to be environmentally friendly, the reverse is actually true, Preissner said. Every construction method needs to be seen in terms of its embedded energy and environmental cost; building with steel and concrete both mean building with materials with a high embedded environmental footprint. Plus the trees used in wood frame are good for the environment to grow — as crops — and are sustainable; they can be regrown at the same pace they’re cut down.
Hofford, Patnode and their teammates have built models of earlier historic examples of wood-framed structures. Neither student is planning to travel to Venice to see the work being shown, though. Hofford says she has more appreciated the tactile, hands-on and collaborative nature of the work, rather than the prestige of participating in a Biennale entry.
Along with the simplicity of the subject, two things separate “American Framing” from past years’ Biennale entries, Andersen and Preissner said.
First, it’s about the architecture, not an architect. Wood framing was invented over time by many people; there are no “starchitects” or celebrity firms attached to its creation or development.
And secondly, with the exterior facade, the main element of the installation isn’t photographs or models or artworks portraying architecture, as is typical. It is architecture in of itself.
What remains to be seen, of course, is how the pavilion will actually be received in Venice. There are some who might take issue with the sheer scale of what they’re attempting, Andersen said. “We could get some flack just for building such a big thing. I mean, that’s pretty American, you know, to build this big, fourstory addition.”
Preissner adds: “This is even just something that just seems boring. Right? It will elicit either someone being impressed by what they’re seeing, or it might be entirely dismissed.”