American Framing: The Same Something for Everyone by Paul Andersen, Jayne Kelley, and Paul Preissner (eds.). Park Books, 252 pp., $40.
Peter Weir’s 1985 movie Witness centers around detective John Book (Harrison Ford) whose quest to find the murderer of an undercover officer takes him on an unforeseen journey into the heart of Amish country. The murder was witnessed by an eight-year-old Amish boy, Samuel Lapp (Lukas Haas), who identifies Book’s colleague James McFee (Danny Glover) as one of the killers. Book realizes that McFee is part of a corrupt ring of officers, led by the chief of police, Paul Schaeffer (Josef Sommer) and that they are all involved in the undercover sale of black-market amphetamines.
McFee tries to kill Book, but only leaves him badly wounded. Book, honor-bound to protect Samuel and his young, widowed mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis), drives them to their community outside the city, where he’s saved from death by the ministrations of an Amish doctor and Rachel. As he tries to keep the investigation going, Book helps around the farm and house, wears Amish clothing to blend in, and earns the trust of the community.
Witness’s iconic sequence—one of the most famous in contemporary American cinema—is the barn-raising scene, a slow and deliberate look at the way that the Amish construct traditional frame houses. Here, the community enlists Book—also an excellent carpenter—as one of their team. The work was not a stretch for Ford, who took up carpentry (with a reported side hustle in weed) in the late 1960s while still a struggling actor because it provided a better income than the bit roles that came by until Star Wars and Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Do carpenters dream of actors?
The barn in Witness is built in a day, and that’s not unusual for frame houses that use the simplest of materials—strips of 2x4—but can still last decades. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that 90 percent of American homes completed in 2019 were wood-framed. Of the remainder, 10 percent were concrete-framed while less than half of 1 percent were steel-framed.
This will be a surprise to many whose (conservative) idea of American architecture trends is that there are too many edifices combining glass, concrete, and steel littering cities and towns everywhere. Wood frames are not seen as trendy but as solidly utilitarian projects, fulfilling their purpose, hardly registering in the public consciousness except, perhaps, in the context of the lumber aisle at Home Depot or on episodes of home-improvement reality TV. Frame houses became ubiquitous in early colonial America because they were cheap, derived from then plentiful forests. That we still depend on the decimation of acres of old growth trees for most of our housing is a startling fact that contradicts the idea that twenty-first-century technologies have brought new and abundant alternatives.
Like Starbucks, once an oddball pioneer and now on par with McDonald’s in its ubiquity, frame houses are a humdrum part of the American landscape. In 2021, Paul Preissner and Paul Andersen curated the exhibition American Framing at the Venice Architecture Biennale in an attempt to celebrate the humdrum. As part of the experience, visitors had to move through an unfinished four-story frame house installation and, once inside, could climb as many as three floors for a better look at the Giardini, one of the Biennale’s main sites. The show has since been traveling, and in May 2022, it stopped by Chicago’s Wrightwood 659 gallery, where workers installed a wood-frame that took up the full height of the atrium. (Visitors couldn’t climb up but could gaze at the insides of the deliberately wonky structure, something like an X-ray of Buster Keaton’s loopy house in One Week.) A more restrained iteration was last seen in Palm Springs in July of 2023. A catalog, American Framing: The Same Something for Everyone, was published in September and provides a record of the images and texts that accompanied the exhibition.
As a project, American Framing is a curious work: At its heart, it wants to rescue frame construction and rehabilitate it as a kind of everyman method that should be seen as essentially liberatory. But to what end? Some variations of the following passage from the project’s website appears in the book and in interviews with the curators: “No amount of money can buy you a better 2x4 than the 2x4s in the poorest neighborhood in town. This fundamental sameness paradoxically underlies the American culture of individuality, unifying all superficial differences.” In the wall text of the exhibition’s Chicago outing, the curators noted that wood framing suffers from “a lack of disciplinary prestige.” But that’s not exactly true. In her essay for the book, Penelope Dean points to architects who’ve used the frame house to, well, frame their artistic points, including a young Frank Gehry, who, in his contribution to the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, “polemically critiqued historicist postmodern facadism by offering the frame as something to look through.” Yet even Dean eventually suggests that the project offers “an architecture that elevates the prosaic and destabilizes the formal.” And again we ask: To what end?
The idea of a lack of “disciplinary prestige” seems to haunt the curators, much like a bestselling romance novelist might gripe about getting no respect from the New York Review of Books. In their search for “prestige,” Preissner and Andersen, along with their coeditor Jayne Kelley, bring together a series of short essays, images, and historical vignettes to hammer home the idea that there is something to be rediscovered in the sheer ordinariness of frame houses. They’re not entirely wrong: in Chris Strong’s original photographs, frame houses appear as majestic cathedrals, the slants and crosses of the blonde wood strips obtaining a graphic force. The catalog is replete with reminders of the historical evolution of frame houses and their origins. In a particularly poignant rendering derived from a 1870 sketch by the Marquis of Lorne, gigantic Douglas firs and cedar trees flank both sides of a narrow and rough road through which a lone covered wagon makes its way. Undated and anonymous photographs of burning houses remind us of the system’s vulnerability. The reproducibility of frame houses was the major appeal of the now discontinued, mail order Sears Homes, sent to eager, would-be homeowners in highly organized kits that included everything from the lumber to the nails. Today, the first signs of gentrification in a neighborhood are the appearance of doggie wash businesses and the disappearance of public laundromats. In early nineteenth-century America, still flexing that name, the appearance of frame houses and the disappearance of entire peoples and habitats were the first signs of rapid change. Frame houses are cathedrals of capitalist expansion, signs at the frontier that the land will be swept anew.
In its longing for respectability, American Framing creates a nostalgia for something never lost: The frame house is here to stay, whether we like it or not, at least until we run out of wood.
American Framing, the catalog, makes clear that refurbishing the history of a style of construction that has literally led to the decimation of vast swaths of forest and older forms of habitation requires some acknowledgment of its costs and complications. To that end, the catalog begins with an account of how Sol Dacus, the head of the union of African American sawmill workers, narrowly escaped a lynching in 1919. Elsewhere, there are photographs, also by Strong, of a familiar sight at big-box hardware stores: immigrant day laborers gathered in the parking lot on a cold winter’s day, waiting to be picked for low-paying jobs. A Black man with flowing locks is shown shirtless on a site, pounding away at a frame or resting on a stepladder: the effect is part American Builders Quarterly, part Calendar of Carpenter Hotties. The careful placement of racialized figures seems tacked on, like a careful checking of DEI boxes. Look, the catalog seems to declare, we acknowledge race. Like 65.6 percent of their profession, Preissner and Andersen are white. The next largest category is Asian (16 percent), followed by Hispanic or Latino (11.8 percent). African Americans/Blacks are so scarce that they’re lumped under “Unknown” (3.9 percent). Of the country’s licensed architects, 77 percent are men.
In Witness, that blinding male whiteness is quietly absorbed into the narrative. Traditions are always invented, as any number of historians and anthropologists remind us, and new ones are built on the backs of the old, slowly acquiring the patina of ancientness, like aging wood furniture. The child Samuel shows Book how harmoniously the Amish live with nature: a simple wooden implement uses the movement of the stream to deliver water into the house. Nowhere in sight is there any evidence of, for instance, the Lenape, who lived in the area before being colonized and nearly exterminated. But Witness is not required to offer some kind of land acknowledgment.
American Framing is not entirely beholden to that requirement, either, but it’s also overly eager to claim new ground for something that is surely unsustainable in the long term. In “American Hutness,” Dan Handel moves back and forth between praise for frame houses and an acknowledgement of their problems: “the act of liberation embodied in building one’s home from wood gets intertwined with community ordinances, product supply chains, labor markets, and mortgage schemes.” Yet he concludes that “American hutness … has at least the potential of realigning with the 99 percent and becoming an architectural vehicle for financial and cultural independency. Otherwise, its instances will remain scattered across the country as product placements for bygone individual liberties in a once democratic republic.”
Does it, though? And for whom has this ever been a “democratic republic”? American Framing is, throughout, wistful in this way, always asking for respect, respect, respect. Frame houses were long seen as the ultimate expression of American individualism: literally anyone could, theoretically, move into a forest and build a shelter according to the most basic specifications. Whether or not those abodes were desirable or actually habitable was another matter: Henry David Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond in 1845 and put off plastering the walls because the feel of the fresh air made him feel “connected” to the woods. And then came November and the freezing cold weather. Over many decades, frame houses have become the quintessential American home, as much a part of suburban dreariness as a marker of a long-forgotten solitary self, forging one’s own journey at an ever-expanding—now closed—frontier.
In its longing for respectability, American Framing creates a nostalgia for something never lost: The frame house is here to stay, whether we like it or not, at least until we run out of wood. The aim here seems to be to make people like it more. The curators appear dissatisfied with the fact that frame houses are seen as background buildings, not as capital-A architecture. The blurb for the book reads: “For architecture, it offers a story of an American project that is bored with tradition, eager to choose economy over technical skill, and accepting of a relaxed idea of craft in the pursuit of something useful and new—the forming of an architecture that enables architecture.”
This is like asking that we look anew at the paints that go into paintings: interesting to a point, but the project soon exhausts itself. Preissner and Andersen frame houses as would-be artists: Daniel Shea’s original photos turn tree trunks and even the masks worn by workers into abstractions. To see such in the everyday is always worthwhile, particularly when the aim is anchored to programs of social change. American Framing wants us to think about frame houses as more than houses, but, barring a few vague allusions to individual fulfillment (something different from flourishing), it’s unclear why.
What are buildings supposed to do, and what composes architecture, exactly, if not the frames that keep it standing?
Do buildings dream of architecture?