Framing the American dream

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 24-33

  Monteyne, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950162936     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/1046488041578194     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford, 1985), 292;
2. cf. Carl Condit, American Building (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968), 284. Countless historians tie the balloon frame to the nineteenth-century settlement of the frontier: for representative architectural histories, see the Giedion school in fn. 2;
3. for samples of social histories, see Daniel Boorstin, The Americans (Toronto: Random House, 1965)
4. and James Garvin, A Building History of Northern New England (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001), 23-28.
5. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (4th ed.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1965), 345-52.
6. For example, Ted Cavanagh, "Balloon House: The Original Aspects of Conventional Wood-Frame Construction Re-examined," JAE 51:1 (Sept. 1997): 5-15, details light wood framing techniques going back to the eighteenth century in the Mississippi valley and questions many of the myths behind the genius invention and the supposedly derisive naming of the balloon frame.
7. See also Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (New York: Oxford, 1998), 153-54.
8. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 13.
9. Fred W. Peterson, "Anglo-American Wooden Frame Farmhouses in the Midwest, 1830-1900: Origins of Balloon Frame Construction," in Sally McMurry and Annmarie Adams, eds., People, Power, Places: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VIII (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 2000): 3-16.
10. For the San Francisco reference, see Sprague, "Chicago Balloon Frame," 48-49.
11. and have been reprinted in Leland Roth, ed., America Builds: Source Documents in American Architecture and Planning (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 53-56: I quote, "It is a great saving, though, of labor, to begin at the bottom of a house and build up. In laying the floor first, you have no studs to cut and fit around."
12. Linda Smeins, Building an American Identity: Pattern Book Homes and Communities, 1870-1900 (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1999), 126. Smeins also notes that the balloon frame's "more straightforward approach to building" was its advantage, certainly to pattern-book authors (pp. 74-76).
13. Woodward's National Architect (1869)
14. and Palliser's American Cottage Homes (1878) both refer to balloon framing.
15. Garvin, Building History of Northern New England, 131-32;
16. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997), 56-85.
17. For the variety of housing agencies, see Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1981), 193-98.
18. and Lisa D. Schrenk, "Introduction: The Work of the Architects' Small House Service Bureau," in Your Future Home: Architect-Designed Houses of the Early 1920s (Washington, DC: AIA, 1990), v-vii.
19. The design program is held in the ASHSB Records, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN, Box 152.B.12.13B. See also Schrenk, Your Future Home, viii-xi.
20. Ralph W. Hidy, et al., Timber and Men: The Weyerhaeuser Story (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 356-67, 478.
21. Nelson Courtlandt Brown, The American Lumber Industry (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1923), 264-67.
22. Michael A. Tomlan, "Building Modern America: An Era of Standardization and Experimentation," in Thomas C. Jester, ed., Twentieth Century Building Materials: History and Conservation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), 38-40.
23. History of Yard Lumber Size Standards (Madison, WI: Forest Products Laboratory, Forest Service, USDOA, 1964), 6-16.
24. Frank P. Cartwright, "Sheathing, Nailing, Bracing to Produce Stronger Frame Buildings," Building Age (Feb. 1930): 39-44.
25. Robert M. Cour, The Plywood Age: A History of the Fir Plywood Industry's First Fifty Years (Portland, OR: DFPA, 1955), 114; for the development of waterproof glue, see pp. 83-93.
26. See also Thomas C. Jester, "Plywood," in Twentieth Century Building Materials, 132-35.
27. Cour, Plywood Age, 133-42.
28. For the demographic of building industry workers who volunteered for the Seabees, see William Bradford Huie, Can do! The Story of the Seabees (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1945).
29. Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 80.
30. For several different prefabrication systems, see Joseph B. Mason, History of Housing in the U.S., 1930-1980 (Houston: Gulf, 1982), 23-29.
31. The FPL built two demonstration houses of plywood panel construction in 1934-1937: Manual on Wood Construction for Prefabricated Houses (Washington, DC: FPL, US Forest Service, USDOA, 1947).
32. For an example of this resistance, see Barbara M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: SUNY, 1993), 28-30, 259;
33. Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles, 60, 73, 81-82;
34. and Ned Eichler, The Merchant Builders (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 74.
35. "Big Dave Bohannon: Operative Builder by the California Method," Fortune (April 1946), 194;
36. Note that the earliest Levitt houses were frame-on-slab construction, so the bottom "platform" was actually a concrete slab that performed the same role. For histories of wartime housing projects, see Donald Albrecht, ed., World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation (Washington, DC: National Building Museum; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).
37. Eichler, Merchant Builders, 70.
38. The merchant builders, using government mortgage guarantees to capitalize the development of large tracts and mass production techniques of construction, built great numbers of houses and entire communities during the postwar period. For an overview of merchant construction, see ibid., 67-78; for a description of the reverse assembly line, see Mason, History of Housing in the U.S., 31-45.
39. M. Edwin Green, "Modular Construction - The Building Block Principle in Architectural Design," in Dickson Reck, ed., National Standards in a Modern Economy (New York: Harper Bros., 1956), 83.
40. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 50-51;
41. and Cohen, A Consumers' Republic, 202.
42. Marc A. Weiss, "Marketing and Financing Homeownership: Mortgage Lending and Public Policy in the United States, 1918-1989," Business and Economic History, 2nd series, vol. 18 (1989), 109.
43. Wright, Building the Dream, 248;
44. and Mason, History of Housing in the U.S., 12-14.
45. and Peter G. Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 44-54, for the postwar commodification of the single-family house.
46. For example, "Levitt Adds 1950 Model to his Line," Life (1950): 141-47.
47. "Big Dave Bohannon," 194.
48. Doug Eaton, "Light Frame Durability," Timber Framing 61 (Sept. 2001): 18; Eaton combines historical observations with his own experience as both a light framer and a heavy timber framer.
49. "Housing: What Can Be Done?" Life (Dec. 17, 1945): 36.
50. G.E. Woodward, Woodward's Country Homes (New York, 1869),
51. quoted in Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 347.
52. Peterson, Homes in the Heartland, 8-9.
53. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 345.
54. Field, "A Reexamination," 3-4, 25-29.
55. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 334-44, prepares the reader for understanding the American character of the balloon frame in the sections entitled "Europe Observes American Production" and "The Structure of American Industry."
56. James Marston Fitch, American Building: The Historical Forces That Shaped It, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 13, 121, first published in 1948;
57. and Carl Condit, American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford, 1960), 22-23.
58. Both give the balloon frame quintessential American traits. Balloon frame buildings became "icons of American ideology" as early as 1867, when a house and school, prefabricated in Chicago, were displayed as uniquely American at the Paris Exhibition of that year; Ellen Weiss, "Americans in Paris: Two Buildings," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians XLV (June 1986): 164-67.
59. Cavanagh, "Balloon House," 5-6, 12-13, argues that, rather than a dismissive word related to the light appearance and inconsequentiality of the balloon frame, its moniker more likely derives from dialectical French words with meanings related to saplings, sticks, sheds, and so forth.
60. and Ada Louise Huxtable, "The Balloon Frame - c.1833," Progressive Architecture 38/5 (May 1957): 145-46.
61. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream, var. pag.;
62. and Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1986), 230-31.