![]() “The Westward-Moving House” first appeared in Landscape, the journal Jackson founded in 1951. Jackson’s essay “The Westward-Moving House: Three American Houses and the People Who Lived in Them,” from 1953, and Warren Ashworth and Susan Kander’s novel We, the House, which was published last October by Blue Cedar Press. For me, it brought to mind two inventive works: J.B. The Wrightwood show is an invitation to explore residential construction along many different lines. Wood framing fosters improvisation and allows houses to be altered or expanded at will. The capacity to surprise-to create novel results from standardized pieces-is, for Preissner and Andersen, something worth celebrating. The curators note that, paradoxically, wood framing, for all its sameness and repetitiveness, is a system that supports the American quest for individuality. Wood-framing’s components can be manipulated into an untold number of architectural variations, departures, and idiosyncrasies. One model in the show depicts a beguiling Illinois round barn from 1905. The aim of American Framing is to reveal “the world of wood framing by allowing people to experience firsthand its spaces, forms, and techniques.” Buildings of every size and style are made of wood framing. ![]() It seems a bit of an overarch to pin any blame on when there are such more clearly obvious conveniences that assisted in the atrocities.” Wood framing “made westward expansion easier,” Preissner said, “but European colonialism had no trouble occupying and murdering North American Indians prior to its invention. Guns and people did, and it’s doubtful any imagined lack of wood framing would have slowed the atrocity.” But wood framing didn’t do any of the forcing, or murder. The show directly confronts the brutality of this through the inclusion of the blockhouse military fort, which was wood-framed, easy to build, and used to slaughter native Americans. When I asked Preissner about that, he said: “The exhibition doesn’t make any kind of assertion that wood framing drove native people from the country, but it’s of course a thing which enabled it to happen easier. In Architectural Record, Zach Mortice asserted that the rapid proliferation of wood-framed houses and other wood-framed buildings (along with other 19th century infrastructure) made it easier to “violently displace Indigenous people across North America.” Not everyone views the history of wood-framing in such benign terms. “It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, your house-at least the structure of your house-is made of the same stuff,” Anderson told Metropolis last year. “No amount of money can buy you a better 2×4,” they observe. In Preissner and Andersen’s view, wood framing is one of America’s most overlooked contributions to architecture. Softwood studs weren’t terribly strong, Preissner noted, but when fastened together with mass-produced nails, they formed quickly erected houses for the settlers streaming into mid-America. In an interview for reSITE, Preissner and Andersen explained that wood framing developed in the early 19th century as an alternative to traditional heavy-timber construction and as a response to the bountiful softwood forests in parts of the Midwest. Courtesy of Alphawood Exhibitions, LLC, Chicago. ![]() Installation views of American Framing at Wrightwood 659. Rounding out the show are scale models depicting the history of wood framing: chairs, rockers, and benches made from common lumber photographs and other items. Visitors walking through it get a sense of the vivid effects that are achievable with ordinary wood studs. The show’s dominant feature is a soaring three-story assembly of wood-framing that fills the gallery’s atrium. One year after Venice, the much talked-about exhibition makes its American debut at Wrightwood 659. Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. It’s too mundane a topic-or at least it seemed that way until two associate professors at the University of Illinois Chicago, Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, conceived the American Framing exhibition for the U.S. Rarely has wood-framing been the subject of an architectural show. The gallery is currently staging a resourceful exhibition on wood-frame construction, the method by which more than 90% of U.S. Four years ago, the Pritzker Prize–winner Tadao Ando spectacularly converted a 1920s apartment building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago into exhibition spaces for a gallery named-in deference to its street address-Wrightwood 659.
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