A Place of My Own (20 page)

Though this wood too was Douglas fir, I was only dimly aware of this fact, and might not have noticed had the yard slipped in a few pieces of spruce or pine. Balloon framing doesn’t acquaint you with the particularities of wood in the way post-and-beam framing does, and it’s easy to forget these are trees you’re working with. It’s geometry you worry about—with so many more elements to keep square—rather than the idiosyncrasies of wood. In this sense two-by-four framing is a more abstract kind of work than timber framing, with an industrial rhythm that places a far greater premium on the repetitive task and the interchangeable part. Which is why an amateur like me could frame a knee wall in an afternoon without help from anyone.

What I was discovering in the course of framing my little building, an entire culture had discovered in the middle of the last century. Contemporary accounts of the new technology brim with a kind of giddiness at the rapid feats of construction it had suddenly made possible—houses put up in days, whole towns rising in weeks. “A man and a boy can now attain the same results, with ease, that twenty men could on an old-fashioned frame,” wrote one Chicago observer in 1869. There was, too, a lingering skepticism, reflected in the derisiveness of the term “balloon frame,” that a structure consisting of nothing more substantial than sticks held together with nails could actually stand up or last. What a revolutionary, and unsettling, notion this must have been; imagine if contractors today were suddenly to start building houses out of cardboard. People thought the new frames looked as flimsy as the baskets they resembled.

Though still a technology based on wood, balloon framing is a product of the machine age: it would never have developed if not for the invention of the steam-powered sawmill (which ensured a ready supply of lumber of consistent dimensions) and manufactured nails. Prior to 1830 or so, nails were hand-forged, making them far too precious to be used in the quantities that a balloon frame required. It was the industrial revolution that, by turning nails into a cheap commodity and trees into lumber, prepared the ground for this radical new way of putting together a building.

But if the machine made the balloon frame possible, it was, more than anything else, the ecology of the Great Plains that made it necessary. In the days before the railroad, timber framing depended on an ample supply of trees too large to be transported any great distance. In most places, building in wood had been essentially a local process of translating the native forest into the various shapes of habitation. But as soon as the American frontier slipped west of Chicago, pioneers found themselves for the first time trying to settle a grassland rather than a forest. It was the development of the balloon frame, with its easily transportable materials, that opened such an ecosystem to settlement. The translation of forest into habitation could now take place on the national rather than local level, with Chicago playing the role of middleman, milling wood from the northern forest and shipping it into the unwooded plains. Chicago, and the balloon frame, had transformed the tree into lumber.

Since a couple of men could assemble one of the new frames without the kind of group effort or specialized skills needed to raise a timber frame, a pioneer family now could build a house just about anywhere they wanted. By comparison, the technology of timber framing—communal and hierarchical by its very nature—had been supremely well adapted to the kind of close-knit religious communities that had settled the forested East. Looked at from this perspective, the new building method added a powerful centrifugal force—and a force for individualism—to the settlement of the American West.

Balloon framing also helped usher in an architectural revolution that would remake both the American house and landscape. Post-and-beam construction had been an inherently conservative building method, not least because of the great number of people it required and the considerable danger involved. In
Common Landscape of America
, the historian John Stilgoe explains that every timber-frame barn builder or house builder “laying out the sub-assemblies around the floor of his barn understood that his neighbors would devote one day to raising them into position. It was imperative, therefore, that he plan a [structure] immediately familiar to everyone because no one had time to discuss an unfamiliar construction.” Since traditional designs were quite dangerous enough, it made good sense for builders to shun novel ones, an imperative that produced an architecture as inflexible, boxy, and rigidly Euclidean as the post-and-beam frame itself. As Stilgoe writes, “raising a strange frame tempted fate.”

Not so a balloon frame. This radical new method of cutting and joining trees allowed Americans at mid-century to burst open their post-and-beam boxes and admit the fresh air of architectural originality to their houses. But as much as the new technology, it was the new way of working it made possible—work readily learned and comparatively safe—that changed both the face and the floor plan of the American house. No longer did the house builder need to rely on his neighbors’ willingness to risk their necks raising the frame of his home; now he could hire a journeyman or two and swiftly put up any one of the myriad designs, in a bewildering range of styles, being popularized in the new “pattern books,” many of which became bestsellers.

Reading about this sea change, just as I was making the switch myself from the rigor of post-and-beam to the relative ease of balloon framing, I began to understand some of the lines of forces that bind the art of architecture to the craft of building. I saw how in a balloon-frame wall I could easily put a window or a door, a room divider or a structural support, just about anywhere I wanted; the rigid syntax of timber framing that insisted on a heavy post every eight or sixteen feet had been repealed, and the specialized skills of the joiner suddenly counted for less than those of the architect. It was the ease and flexibility of this new frame that allowed a thousand architectural flowers to bloom in the second half of the nineteenth century, and eventually made it possible to build the kind of airy and dynamic American space Thoreau had prophesied when he dreamed of a house as “open and manifest as a bird’s nest”—a space that could at last accommodate the expansiveness of the American character, being less like a box than, well, a balloon.

The first balloon-frame structure in the world was St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Chicago, erected by three men in three months in the year 1833. Speed and expedience appear to have been the motive forces. Though fewer than a thousand people lived in Chicago at the time, the infant boomtown was already running short of big trees suitable for timber framing. It did have steam-driven sawmills, however, and logs could be floated down along Lake Michigan from the vast white pine forests of Michigan and Wisconsin. The new building method—which for many years was called “Chicago construction”—allowed the city to be built, if not quite in a day, then in something less than a single year. No one, anywhere, had seen anything quite like it before, an entire city thrown together with the flurry and haste of a campground.

St. Mary’s Church was demolished long before anyone had a chance to recognize its historical significance. Which is too bad, but pretty much what you’d expect from an age whose gaze was fixed on the future rather than the past, as well as from a building system that made a virtue not only of speed but of impermanence. Balloon frames are not the stuff of monuments.

But then, it was precisely these qualities that commended the new frame to Americans, who took to it quickly and still rely on it, with some modifications, to build the great majority of their houses. The balloon frame seems to answer to our longings for freedom and mobility, our penchant for starting over whenever a house or a town or a marriage no longer seems to fit. For a people who moves house as often as we do (typically a dozen times in a lifetime) and likes to remodel each house along the way, a balloon frame is the most logical thing to build, since it is not only quick and inexpensive, but easy to modify as well.

J. B. Jackson, the chronicler of America’s vernacular landscape, once wrote that “a house is in many ways a microcosm of the landscape; the landscape explains the house.” When I first came across this somewhat gnomic observation, we had recently bought our house, and I could not see how Jackson’s hypothesis could possibly apply. Like hundreds of thousands of American houses built over the last century, ours was a balloon frame with origins in Chicago: a Sears, Roebuck “ready cut,” or kit house built in 1929, it had been selected from among hundreds of floor plans and styles in a catalog, shipped to Cornwall by boxcar, and then nailed together. Had the farmer built his house with fieldstone, I might have understood Jackson’s point: certainly this rocky hillside would explain
that
house. But how could this landscape explain a mail-order balloon-frame house?

Jackson recounts a long-running argument in the history of American houses between an Old World tradition of stone building (promoted notably by Thomas Jefferson, who deplored the shoddy wood houses Americans were already in the habit of throwing together) and a more restless New World culture of wood. Beginning during the Renaissance, stone construction replaced timber framing in Europe (the French refer to the housing boom of the sixteenth and seventeenth century as “the victory of stone over wood”), but no such victory ever took place in the colonies. Obviously, the easy availability of wood has a great deal to do with this, but even when trees were scarce, as they were in the Great Plains, we quickly figured out a way to keep building in wood. And in places where brick or stone was an option, as it had been for the farmer, wood continued to hold a powerful appeal. Compared to stone, wood was cheaper, faster, and far easier to adapt to changing circumstances. There was optimism in wood.

Had the farmer who built my house thought he’d be staying here for more than a few years, he might well have used the fieldstone he possessed in such abundance. But to have done so would have implied a happier relationship to the land than he appears to have had, as well as a dimmer view of his prospects in life. The very lightness and impermanence of a balloon frame may have represented to him a form of hope. The farmer didn’t mean to put down very deep roots in this rocky soil; why should he, when something better was bound to come along? As soon as it did, he’d shed this place like a chrysalis, no regrets. One did not build a chrysalis out of fieldstone, or even for that matter out of heavy timbers joined together with mortises and tenons. A boxcar full of two-by-fours and a few pounds of nails would do just fine.

I thought about the farmer more than once that spring as we worked on the heavy timber frame of my building. I thought about the speed and ease with which his precut, mail-order frame must have come together; it had taken Joe and me several weeks to get just the front of the structure framed. I also thought about J. B. Jackson’s question, about how the same landscape that “explained” the farmer’s mail-order bungalow could also explain a building as different from it as my post-and-beamy hut. But though this might be the same land the farmer had built on, it was no longer quite the same landscape.

It seemed to me that even the posts themselves implied a landscape some distance from the farmer’s, one that had welcomed back the same trees (oak and hickory, pine and hemlock) that he would have looked upon as weeds. These massive vertical pairs of exposed six-by-tens—so much bigger than anything a structural engineer would have spec’d for the load, and then doubled up on top of that—called attention to themselves as wood, belonged to a landscape in which trees are prized and people have become self-conscious about preserving them. In part this is because it is a landscape shaped no longer primarily by work but by leisure. The farmer’s kit house, with its horizontal clapboards painted white, was the product of a culture that saw virtue in the clear-cutting of forests and was untroubled by a waste of wood we would now consider unconscionable. One ready-cut house catalog of that time made a standing offer to homeowners that would be unthinkable today: “We’ll pay you a dollar for every knot you find in our houses.” Imagine the amount of wood that had to be wasted in order to produce an entirely knot-free house.

Already the stolidness of these corner posts, with their mortises holding the floor beams in an unshakable embrace, suggested, if not permanence, then at least an intention of staying put on the land that the lightly framed bungalow has always lacked. A timber frame creates (and is created by) a more settled landscape than a balloon frame. Any visitor to the site who knew the first thing about construction made the same crack about my heavy frame:
So how many stories up are you planning to go?
“Overbuilt” was the intended dig; and I suppose that it was. Then they would bang on a six-by-ten with the side of their fist, and when that failed to produce even so much as a wiggle, they’d say:
Well I can see this building’s not going anywhere
. Nor the man who built it.

The space for these observations, most of them made sitting on the half-framed floor of my half-framed building, opened up in April, when Joe suffered an injury at work that laid him up for several weeks. He’d been working on a foundation crew, setting and stripping concrete forms, when the bucket of a front-end loader swung around and whacked him square in the back, bruising him badly. In his absence, I had managed to frame the knee wall running across the middle of the building and to notch the rear posts, but there was no way I could now raise them by myself; I couldn’t even carry them out here by myself, much less lift them onto their pins and shoes. I’d run up against the fact that timber framing was by its nature communal work, requiring the help of many hands. Finding himself in my predicament, the farmer could have finished his balloon frame alone.

Joe’s first day back—he showed up in a corset, moving stiffly—turned out to be one of the project’s darkest. Our task had been to raise the rear posts and then run the floor beams from the center knee wall on which they sat to the notches we’d cut for them in the rear posts. It quickly became clear that something was terribly wrong: Neither beam met its intended post at anything even remotely resembling a right angle. One of them missed its mortise by a full two inches—which, in an eight-by-thirteen-foot structure, is to say by a mile. Wordlessly, we both reached for our tapes. We measured and compared the long diagonals, corner to corner, and confirmed that the building had indeed fallen seriously, inexplicably, out of square.