»Unfinished stud walls offer a fleeting reminder of the fact that suburban architecture originates in the forest. In the brief period between its assembly and its concealment beneath layers of paneling and siding, this structural framework evokes its own material origins. Standing at the centre of the impossible knot of timber that constitutes these part-built suburban houses is like being at the heart of a densely woven thicket. …The effect is of a phantom suburbia that flickers in and out of view, a ghostly home summoned and then extinguished by the light filtering down through the machine-engineered forest.«
-- Manifest Destiny, p. 38
The first time I became aware of the idea of “revenge appreciation” it was applied to the work of the photographer Jeff Wall. Wall constructs photographs based on classical paintings, and some critics – most prominently the writer Thierry de Duve
– perceive an element of revenge in the way he uses the historical depiction of social issues to question modernism. This type of revenge is not spiteful but instead appreciative of the way references can avenge history through reinterpretation. Coming across the term, I wondered how a similar “positive” or productive type of appreciation of the past might likewise be perceived in contemporary architectural forms.
The architecture historian Vincent Scully uses the term “revenge” in a similar way. In his book The Shingle Style Today: Or The Historian's Revenge, Scully describes two classic New England architecture styles, Shingle and Stick, which ran parallel during the 1860s. Stick Style in particular foregrounds the materiality of wood in its construction. Then and now, both Shingle and Stick styles symbolize an unpretentious lifestyle: something quintessentially American and wholesome, reminiscent of a bygone time when
“Washington never told a lie.” For Scully, wood-frame construction does this by reinforcing the associations between the architecture of the 1860s and the Colonial or “Struggle” Period of the earliest American houses. Such appropriation of past styles could be seen, like Wall’s work, as a type of historical revenge.
In the US, perhaps more than anywhere else, architecture is inextricably bound to the forest. Wooden construction holds a symbolic connection with the virtue of hard work and therefore to an American idea of humility. In wooden architecture, “we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.
Mark Twain’s house is a classic example of the link between labor, humility, and wood. Built by the architect Edward T. Potter in the 1860s, the house epitomizes the Stick Style that Scully writes about. Potter combined vernacular styles to
»This type of revenge
is not spiteful but
instead appreciative.«
provide summer homes that offered an escape from urbanism to a rural landscape. This architecture expresses an appreciation for humble country life, also a major theme in Twain’s writing. His house is replete with trussed gables (no two the same), diagonal curving porch support braces, overhanging eaves, and exposed rafter ends. These exposed wooden elements are rhetorical statements about the virtue of work.
The value of work expressed in wooden architecture surfaced again in images of the post-war deskilled construction of the first mass-produced suburban houses, most notably in Levittown (1947-1951). A romantic affection for suburbia’s quasi-industrial yet “natural” wooden aesthetic was captured in mid-century depictions by American photographers like William Garnett (Lakewood) and Robert Adams (Colorado), who helped re-mythologize the wholesomeness of this material.
How is “the soul of the workman” expressed in architecture today, and how does nostalgia for the worker find new form? In my travelogue book about American suburbia titled Manifest Destiny, a chapter called “Stud Forests” focuses on semi-complete stud construction in today’s sprawling suburban housing complexes. It would be impossible to imagine suburbia without the timber stud, which has become an icon of de-skilled construction practice in the US. The 2x4-inch stud provides the ubiquitous clotheshorse for the majority of suburban houses. In exploring these half-built stud frames I find a nascent form of wood’s historical connotation of humility beneath the surface of nearly all suburban US homes, i.e. in the “phantomized” architecture of the empty silhouettes of 4x2-inch framing.
There is little in contemporary architecture I find so unwittingly
»How is ‘the soul of the
workman’ expressed in architecture
today, and how does nostalgia for
the worker find new form?«
Jason Griffiths is an architect and writer. He is Assistant Professor at the Herberger Institute, Arizona State University, Pheonix, Arizona. His work investigates the relationship between popular culture and architecture. Both his teaching and creative work explore digital fabrication techniques, investigating contemporary vernacular forms of building.
Jason has exhibited and published widely including in the AA Files, Architecture, JA, JAE and the Sunday Times. His book Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing was published in 2011 by AA Publications. It provides a visual anthropology of the North American suburbs and won the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) book award (Typology) at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
symptomatic of the Stick Style sentiment than today’s half-finished suburban homes – of wood “phantomized across surfaces,” as Scully writes. These homes, left unfinished in the wake of the housing crisis of the last five years, are frozen in a state of humble impermance, a reverie for something on the point of being irrecoverably lost. Despite the financial crisis, people are still unwilling to relinquish the fantasy of the suburban house, and instead seek to redress societal excess with the perceived humility of a bygone age. When something is at a point of frailty it is also at the most potent moment to re-mythologize it. There is nothing like scaring people into thinking that they'll lose something if they don't hurry up and preserve it.
The designers and the teams of construction workers that create suburban houses today have no explicit intention to instill this loaded meaning in the architecture. However, like many architects, my historical narrative is drawn from visual associations rather than assumed intentions. Stud frames in the raw have the potential to remind US architects of the inexorable link between the forest and the home – a contemporary narrative of the “revenge appreciation” of wood in American architecture.
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