“Frame 122” Residential Building

Residential construction in the United States has long been dependent on the availability and deployment of timber. From early settler cabins and pretty New England homesteads in times gone by to cookie-cutter, single-family houses multiplying in the rapid sprawl of suburbia after World War II, American homes – and televisual American images of domesticity – are indebted to techniques of forestry and milling, the fabrication of building components, and the coordination of such components on profit-conscious construction sites.

In avant-garde circles, however, Modernism – or the International Style, as promulgated by a powerful cultural elite – became associated with industrialization and new mechanical processes. Thus, Richard Neutra painted his slim timber posts and beams silver to appear like metal. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, that articulate advocate for the organic, frequently limited woodwork to fenestration, ceilings, cabinetry and other subsidiary components, his houses built up from field stone or concrete pigmented to merge with the surrounding landscape.

It took architects of the 1960s generation to question the heroic poses and top-down planning of High Modernism. Robert Venturi clearly signaled a wittier and more complex vernacular with his mother’s house in Philadelphia and later, with Denise Scott Brown, a reappraisal of post-War suburbs such as Levittown. In California, Charles Moore and his colleagues in MLTW riffed on local sheds and barns in taut bespoke structures, most famously the redwood condominium above the Pacific at Sea Ranch, as Frank Gehry in Los Angeles explored the artistic potential of off-the-shelf lumber.

Now, the collective mind of North American architects has again turned to the capacities of timber in architecture. Mass timber and Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) are frequently heralded for their rational modes of assembly (a form of mechanization, of course) and as a response to...

Proceed with your preferred purchase option to continue reading

Digital

5.49 €

Add to cart

Printed

15.00 €

Add to cart

Subscription

From 42.00 €

Choose subscription