American Framing

America’s most familiar building is acutally quite exceptional: the wood-frame house.

The installation built in Wrightwood 659’s atrium for American Framing makes the ordinary extraordinary—expressing the hidden aesthetic resonance and infinite possibility of wood framing. The installation presents and distorts the form of the ubiquitous American house, citing and abstracting familiar structures to create a sense of discovery and fascination through the mundane. The structure is adapted from a larger installation constructed outside of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Curious about how the installation came together here at Wrightwood 659? Our installation was built over the course of 10 days, by a total crew of nine people. The construction required: more than 4,500 feet of lumber, 3,000 screws, 5 carpenters and 4 scaffolders and 400 hours to build.

Opines Philip Langdon of COMMON EDGE: “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. The gallery is currently staging a resourceful exhibition on wood-frame construction, the method by which more than 90% of U.S. houses are built.

Rarely has wood-framing been the subject of an architectural show. 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. Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. One year after Venice, the much talked-about exhibition makes its American debut at Wrightwood 659.

The show’s dominant feature is a soaring three-story assembly of wood-framing that fills the gallery’s atrium. Visitors walking through it get a sense of the vivid effects that are achievable with ordinary wood studs. 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.

In an interview for reSITE, Preissner and Andersen explained that wood framing developed in the early 19th century as an alternative to traditional heavy-lumber construction and as a response to the bountiful softwood forests in parts of the Midwest. 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 Preissner and Andersen’s view, wood framing is one of America’s most overlooked contributions to architecture. Its components are egalitarian. ‘No amount of money can buy you a better 2x4,’ they observe. ‘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. ‘I think that’s really democratic.’” —COMMON EDGE

American Framing is presented at Wrightwood 659 by Alphawood Exhibitions in cooperation with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). American Framing was originally made possible by The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the U.S. Department of State and the University of Illinois Chicago for presentation at the Pavilion of the United States at the 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale.