CHAPTER 5

Framing

The corner posts arrived on a snowy January morning, four red plastic flags flapping off the tail of a flatbed. At first I was puzzled. I’d ordered eight six-by-ten timbers—two for each corner of the building—not four. But as the truck backed into the driveway, I realized the mill had simply cut twenty-footers instead of tens, leaving it to me to saw them in half. It made no difference, really, and yet it did. Without meaning to, the mill had made sure I understood these were trees they’d sent me from Oregon, not just a pile of lumber.

The yard had sent two men to help unload. A friend of mine also happened to be around, and after taking a few minutes to small-talk and gather ourselves for the task, the four of us slid one of the great timbers off the flatbed and, with a collective groan, hoisted it up onto our shoulders. Moving at an almost ceremonial pace, we walked the massive trunks up the long, snow-crusted incline to the barn, where Joe and I intended to work on our frame indoors until spring.

Whenever more than two people are carrying something as long and heavy as these timbers, it is the tallest person, and not necessarily the strongest, who ends up shouldering the greatest load, and that turned out by a few unlucky inches to be me. One of the guys from the yard estimated that the timbers had to weigh easily a quarter of a ton apiece, and as I felt my share of the load—one quarter of that plus the tallest-guy penalty—grind into the little bone at the top of my shoulder, I started seriously to doubt I could make it all the way to the barn. After awhile all I could think about was how I was going to keep clear of the falling timber when my shoulder—or would it be my knees?—gave out. Struggling to stave off the calamity, I tried to imagine myself as a pallbearer at the funeral of an exceptionally large relative, and rehearsed the shame and embarrassment that would follow were I to drop my end of the load. This did the trick; we made it safely to the barn.

A twenty-foot piece of clear Douglas fir is an impressive thing to behold. By virtue of its girth and length it seems more tree than lumber, though you can easily understand why lumber is what we prefer to call it. Lumber is an abstraction—a euphemism, really. Though these logs had been squared up and dressed at the mill, it was impossible not to be conscious of them as trees—and not to feel at least slightly abashed at what had been done to them on my account. Simply by picking up the phone and placing an order for “eight ten-foot pieces of six-by-ten appearance-grade Doug fir,” I’d set in motion a chain of events that was as momentous as it was routine. To fill my order, at least two mature fir trees, green spires as old as the century, had been felled in a forest somewhere in Oregon and then trucked, or floated, to a mill in a town called McMinnville. This much I knew from the yellow cardboard tag stapled to the endgrain. There they’d been skinned of their bark and, after several passes through a saw and then a planer, transformed into the slabs of salmon-colored lumber that, following a cross-country journey by train, came to lie on the floor of this barn in Connecticut, looking more than a little forlorn.

It’s hard not to feel sentimental about such majestic pieces of wood, especially today, when we can appreciate the preciousness of old trees more than we once did. One measure of that preciousness is price. The four timbers in my barn cost more than $600, a figure that manages to seem both exorbitant and—considering what they are, or were—paltry at the same time. Since the corner posts would be a conspicuous element of the interior as well as the exterior of the building, Charlie had specified the highest-grade “clear”—that is, knot-free—fir, wood that is generally found only in the unbranched lower trunks of the oldest trees. It is the fate of precisely such Douglas firs, and the creatures whose habitat depends on them, that loggers and environmentalists have been fighting over in the Pacific Northwest, a fight that has already closed down hundreds of sawmills like the one in McMinnville.

Though I had no paralyzing regrets about taking a couple of these trees, I have to say that what I knew about them, and what I saw before me, did give me pause, heightening the sense of occasion that attended my plans for them. It would be awhile before I felt comfortable putting a saw blade or a chisel to these timbers. You couldn’t help feeling responsible for pieces of wood like this, and risking a mistake—learning on them, which is after all what I proposed to do—seemed almost unconscionable, a sacrifice of something that had been sacrificed once already.

Had the ton of lumber sitting on the floor of my barn been an equivalent pile of two-by-fours instead, I doubt if any of these thoughts would have crossed my mind. For one thing, ordinary “dimension lumber,” as it is called, represents another order of abstraction from the forest. It takes a more strenuous exercise of imagination to see the tree in the two-by-four. For another, the kinds of trees generally used to produce two-by-fours are not the kinds of trees anybody mourns for. In most cases these trees are spindly young specimens harvested from industrial tree farms rather than from forests.

But two-by-fours were not an option for the frame of my building, even though Joe and I would be using plenty of them elsewhere in its construction. Charlie had specified large timbers because our original notion of the building, as a kind of primitive hut carved out of the forest, was unthinkable without them. The archetypal hut consists of four substantial corner posts (actual trees, in some accounts) surmounted by a gable made of timbers only slightly less substantial. A hut’s construction should recall the forest from which it springs, and that’s more easily done with six-by-ten timbers than sticks of what carpenters call “two-by.”*

The primitive hut is a myth, really, a story of the origins of architecture in the state of nature. As the story goes, architecture was given to man by the forest, which taught him how to form a shelter out of four trees, one at each corner, crowned by pairs of branches inclining toward one another like rafters. Like many myths this one is fanciful but also in some deep sense true. For architecture as we know it is unimaginable without the tree. Frank Lloyd Wright, speaking of the very first structures built by man, once wrote that “trees must have awakened his sense of form.” It is the tree that gave us the notion of a column and, in the West at least, everything else rests upon that. Even when the Greeks turned from building in wood to stone (after they’d denuded their land of trees), they shaped and arranged their stones in imitation of trees: Greek architecture is based on wooden post-and-beam construction. An architecture utterly ignorant of trees is conceivable, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be our architecture. Long after the forests are all gone and “wood” has been forgotten, our buildings will still be haunted by trees.

If the idea of a hut dictated the big, treelike timbers, the timbers in turn dictated the building’s system of construction. It would be a variation on the traditional post-and-beam, in which the frame of a building is comprised of large and generously spaced vertical posts joined to horizontal beams. Traditionally, these joints were of the type known as mortise and tenon: The end of each beam is chiseled to form a protruding shape called a tenon (from “tongue”) that is inserted into a matching notch, or mortise, carved into the post, and then held in place with wooden pegs driven through the two members. Until the 1830s, when carpenters in Chicago invented the modern “balloon frame,” in which relatively light pieces of lumber are joined with nails, virtually all buildings built out of wood had post-and-beam frames held together with mortises and tenons.

Traditional post-and-beam joinery requires a specialized set of skills not many carpenters possess anymore, so it seemed unlikely Joe and I would attempt to mortise-and-tenon our frame. Learning how to reliably sink a twelve-penny nail promised to be challenge enough for at least half of this construction crew. Evidently assuming as much, Charlie had proposed a suitably idiot-proof alternative to a traditional joint: his construction drawings called for a steel “joist hanger” at the point where the corner posts joined the four-by-eight beams that would support the floor. A joist hanger is essentially a small steel seat, or sleeve, attached to a vertical plate; the plate gets nailed to the post, and the horizontal beam is dropped into the seat and held in place with common nails. Since this particular joint would be hidden beneath the floor, there was probably no good reason not to use a joist hanger.

But Joe didn’t see things that way. The afternoon he noticed the joist hanger on the blueprint he evenly but firmly informed me that, no matter what “the architect” had to say about it, no building he was going to work on would use a joist hanger to secure such an important joint. To emphasize the point, he noisily flicked the back of his hand against the offending section of blueprint while he spoke. I suspect that Joe may have been insulted by the drawing, that he’d taken Charlie’s spec as an affront to his skill as a carpenter. I tried to explain that it had obviously been my competence Charlie had in mind, not his. That might be, Joe said, but the fact remained that steel was not the proper way to join two large wooden members together, and he wasn’t about to do it.

Most of the good carpenters I’ve ever met have a deep devotion to wood and a corollary disdain for steel. Steel might be stronger than wood, but in the mind of many carpenters—especially those carpenters who regard themselves as upholders of a tradition that built a nation out of wood and hardly anything else—steel is still a shade too newfangled to be trusted completely. Steel represents the triumph of industry over craft in construction, and one of the things that draws a person to carpentry today is that it remains one of the few refuges of craft in an industrial economy.

A carpenter like Joe is inclined to think of himself as a guardian of wood’s glorious past, if not its sacred honor. Not that Joe is a reactionary on the subject of materials; his time in the body shop has made him more comfortable working with steel than nine out of ten carpenters. But it offended his sense of propriety to join a post to a beam with a joist hanger bought at the hardware store, not when the application of time-tested craft could produce a joint that would not only be more in keeping but would probably last longer too. The fact that nobody would ever see our joint was irrelevant. “That doesn’t matter—we’ll know,” Joe said after I made a pitch along these lines for sticking with Charlie’s spec. I still regarded the construction drawings as canonical, a habit of mind Joe appeared determined to break. A contest for authority was brewing, and it looked like I was the ground on which it was going to be fought.

What Joe proposed we use in place of Charlie’s joist hanger was not, strictly speaking, a true mortise-and-tenon joint. Since the dimensions of the beam (four by eight) were considerably smaller than the post’s, we could simply “let” the beam into a four-by-eight notch chiseled into the post, as if the whole beam were a tenon. We would then secure the joint with a bolt, evidently a permissible use of steel. I checked with Charlie, who gently pointed out that this would be an awful lot of work for a detail nobody would ever see. But he had no objection, just so long as we made sure each beam had at least three inches of “bite,” or purchase, on its post. So I went out and bought an inexpensive set of wood chisels. Joe had won one—for wood, but also, as I would come to understand, for himself.

 

Our first day of wood work, Joe showed up with an incongruous pair of tools: a set of fine chisels with ash handles and a fairly beat-up looking chain saw. The chain saw was to cut our posts roughly to length; this would constitute the first cut made in our fir, and as I was afraid he might, Joe insisted that I make it.

I am petrified by chain saws, a phobia I don’t regard as irrational or neurotic in the least. It is in fact scientific, being grounded in the laws of probability and the empirical fact of my innate clumsiness and haste in dealing with the physical world. The way I see it, there is only a fixed number of times—unknowable, but certainly not large—that I can expect to use a chain saw before I become the victim of a blood-spurting and possibly life-threatening accident.

Fitting though it may have been to burn up one of those times making the posts for my hut, this didn’t mean I was happy about it. Yet there was no way to decline the chain saw Joe held out to me without suffering a loss of face. Though Joe himself is not overbearingly macho, a masculine weather hangs over all construction sites, and it seems to inspirit certain tools in particular—generally the ones that are loudest, most dangerous, and most dramatic in their worldly impact. That puts the chain saw right up there. Joe and I shared no illusions I had any clue what I was doing as a carpenter, but it would have been a mistake to compound my ignorance with a lack of pluck right at the beginning. So, striving manfully for nonchalance, I took the chain saw from Joe, gave its starting cord a yank, and held on tight as the machine leapt menacingly to life.

Cutting the fir timbers proved unexpectedly easy, probably because there were no imperfections in the wood, no knots or bark to frustrate the blade and provoke its willfulness. The snout of the saw moved like a knife through the soft, cheddary wood, its gasoline howl—deafening indoors—the sole evidence of effort or resistance. For the first time, I noticed the sweet, elusive aroma of fresh-cut Doug fir, an oddly familiar perfume that nevertheless took me the longest time to place. But then there it was: roasted peanuts and hot spun sugar, the summery scents of the fairground.

The chain saw gave us four posts each roughly ten feet long; now we had to cut them exactly to length with a circular saw and then lay out the locations of our notches. These particular measurements were not shown on the drawings, however, since they could not be determined without taking certain particularities of the site into account. To arrive at the precise length of the posts, we needed to add the specified height of the walls (shown on the blueprint as 8’1”) to the unspecified distance between the top of the rock footings (each of which was slightly different) and the floor. But where exactly was the floor? Charlie had left that for us to determine.

Normally the height of a building’s floor is determined simply by measuring up from the top of the foundation. But because of the differences among the elevations of our four footings (owing both to the slope of the site and to variations in the size of the boulders), we instead had to fix the floor height at a hypothetical point in space (whatever looked best, basically) and then measure down from there to our footings. Every other measurement in the building would be based on the coordinates of this imaginary plane.

Does this sound confusing? It was. “I’m starting to see a pattern here,” Joe muttered as we trekked out to the site to make our field measurements. The footings were covered with a foot of snow. “Nothing about this building is normal.”

Back in the warmth of the barn, Joe and I each took custody of a post, marking it for length (remembering to subtract 1½? for the pressure-treated wood shoe it would stand on) and then penciling on its face a 3½”-by-7½” rectangle where the notch (for our four-by-eight beam) would go. I was eager to start in on my mortise, but Joe had a lesson for the day he wanted to make sure I took to heart: “Measure twice, cut once.” Simple as it is, this is one of the carpenter’s most important axioms, aimed at averting mistakes and the waste of wood. It proved to be one I had a hard time honoring, however, probably because I was so accustomed to working in a medium in which the reworking of material is not only possible, but desirable. “Undo Typing” is actually one of the commands in my word-processing program, part of a whole raft of options designed expressly to accommodate a writer’s haste, sloppiness, or second thoughts. There being no “Undo Sawing” command, the carpenter who makes a mistake is apt to call, in jest, for the “wood stretcher”—a tool that of course doesn’t exist. The irreversibility of an action taken in wood is how the carpenter comes by his patience and deliberation, his habit of pausing to mentally walk through all the consequences of any action—to consider fully the implications for, say, the trimming of a doorjamb next month of a cut made in a rafter today. These were alien habits of mind, but ones I’d resolved to learn. So I followed Joe out the door, trudging back into the snow to double-check our measurements.

To trade a chain saw for a chisel is to trade one way of knowing a piece of wood for another. Though the chain saw acquaints you with certain general properties—a wood’s hardness and uniformity, its aroma—the chisel discloses much finer information. Something as subtle as the variation in the relative density of two growth rings—the sort of data any machine would overwhelm—the beveled tip of the chisel’s steel blade will accurately transmit to its ash handle and through that to your hand.

The chisel enters into the body of the fir tree, and when it is sharp, the material it encounters there feels less like wood than dense flesh. As I tapped on the handle with my ash mallet, the blade sliced easily through its salmon-colored layers, raising a plume of curled shavings I half expected to be moist to the touch. Before a well-honed blade, the substance of a piece of clear Douglas fir yields almost as if it were a slab of tuna. As the chisel slips past the dead outer skin of the timber, the wood brightens and colors, seems more alive.

Once I grew comfortable with the tool, working the fir became thoroughly enjoyable, more pastime than chore. Mortising calls for an appealing mix of attentiveness and mindlessness, keeping part of the mind engaged while setting the rest of it free to wander. Also counting in its favor was the fact that the chisel was a tool that couldn’t easily kill me, no matter how badly I mishandled it. Having been put to the same purpose for a few thousand years, the chisel feels supremely well adapted to its task. Its blade has two different faces—one beveled at a forty-five-degree angle, the other straight. The first one wants to dig down deep into the substance of the wood, the second to slip more lightly along its grain, shaving off curls of fir thin enough to let light through them. By rotating the handle of the tool in your hand, you can carefully regulate the amount of wood the blade removes, plunging or shaving depending on how close to the borders of the notch you’re working. The challenge is to keep to the outlines you’ve drawn, being careful not to make the notch any bigger than it absolutely has to be, in order to ensure a snug fit. So every few minutes I’d test my notch by inserting a scrap piece of four-by-eight, which served as understudy for my beam.

After some practice the tool began to feel light and alive in my hands, almost as if it knew what it was supposed to do. Which in some sense it did. Like any good hand tool, but especially one that has been fine-tuned over centuries, a well-made chisel contains in its design a wealth of experience on which the hands of a receptive user can draw. Working properly with such a tool awakens that experience, that particular knowledge of wood; at the same time it helps to preserve it. When the chiseling was going particularly well, it reminded me of what it is like to work with an exceptionally well-trained animal; if I paid close enough attention to what it wanted to do, even let it steer me a bit, the chisel had things to teach me.

After Thoreau cut down the pine trees for the frame of his hut at Walden, he hewed and notched the logs himself, a process—an intimacy, to judge by his account of it—that he believed had somehow righted his relationship to the fallen trees. “Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree,” he wrote, even “though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it.” I used to think this was a too-convenient rationalization for Thoreau’s having done something that ordinarily he would have deplored. This is, after all, the same Thoreau who once composed an elegy for a pine tree felled by a lumberman (“Why does not the village bell sound a knell?”). Now we are to believe that the care he has taken hewing these pines, the purpose to which he’s put them, and the knowledge they have yielded are enough to compensate for the sacrifice. Yet the idea no longer seemed self-serving or crazy, as Thoreau’s arguments sometimes do. It was the work that bought this intimate knowledge, the inescapable price of which is the death of a tree. Though it’s probably wrong to think that only the handworker, with his traditional tools, gains such an intimate acquaintance with trees; the lumberman working with his screaming chain saw knows trees too, he just knows different things about them. Both, however, come to know the tree better than its more distant admirers.

My own acquaintance with Douglas fir owed as much to the desultory chatter of my chiseling companion (the pace and quiet of the work, which has a lot in common with whittling, is ideal for conversation) as it did to the clinking of my chisel. Going by the number of growth rings, I determined that seventy-five years of tree life were represented in the section I was working; the tree had to be still older than that, however, since the section contained neither its innermost nor outermost ring. As I chiseled my way down to a depth of three inches, slowing as I neared my target, I noticed that the rings were not evenly spaced. The innermost ones were as thick as my finger, and they narrowed as they moved out from the core, until they were so slender as to be barely discernible. According to Joe, this indicated that the tree had probably started life out in the open, allowing it to make rapid growth during its first few years. As the forest grew up around it, however, sunlight became progressively more scarce and the tree’s growth slowed accordingly. The pattern suggested my fir tree was probably second-growth, and that it may have been planted on the site of a clear-cut.

I noticed too that each ring was made up of two distinct layers: Rings of reddish-brown, dense-looking wood alternated with ones that were softer and pinkish-yellow in hue. Joe explained that a fir tree puts on two distinct kinds of growth every year. It seems the tree grows very rapidly in the spring, laying down a wide, porous layer of cambium in order to speed the passage of water and nutrients to its flush of new leaves. Growth slows in the summer, and the tree adds a thinner layer of hardwood, the main purpose of which is to strengthen the trunk. Fir is known for laying down a consistently high proportion of strong, dense summerwood, which is what makes it such a good structural timber. As I chiseled, I could feel the difference between spring- and summerwood as a slight change in resistance.

While we worked on our respective notches, Joe and I passed the time talking about the intricacies of post-and-beam construction. The joints we were making were relatively simple ones—no dovetails or, for that matter, true tenons to worry about—but even so, Joe had dozens of tips, big and small, to pass on, most of them having to do with the choice and handling of chisels and the behavior of wood grain; you could see that, behind this process, stood an old and intricate culture of woodwork. But much as I enjoyed making my notches, I was somewhat relieved there weren’t many more of them to make. The work proceeded slowly, its progress measured in fractions of inches. You worried constantly about trespassing the borders of your notch, a transgression that couldn’t be taken back. When I saw how long it took us to make two mortises in a single post (one to hold the floor beam, another for the header), the idea of erecting an entire building by this method—hewing the timbers, chiseling hundreds of joints far more elaborate than ours, and then raising the frame all by hand—well, all this now seemed about as improbable to me as building a pyramid.

When I grumbled about the cumbersomeness of mortising compared to hammering together a frame of two-by-fours with nails, Joe sprang to the defense of post-and-beam construction. He claimed that timber frames were structurally superior to modern balloon frames (and indeed there are post-and-beam frames from the Middle Ages still standing in Europe) and that they made a more economical use of wood; the additional passes through a saw required to transform a log into two-by-fours wasted far more wood (in the form of sawdust), not to mention energy.

There was a certain poetic economy in post-and-beam framing, in the way it seemed to carry the “treeness” of lumber forward into a building. The vertical posts performed like trunks, exploiting the strength of wood fibers in compression, while the horizontal beams acted very much like limbs, drawing on their strength in tension. And as I realized the first time we fitted a beam into its notch, the two members locked together in a satisfyingly knotlike way; instead of the superficial attachment made by a nail, the beam nested into the body of the post almost as if it were a bough. But, soundness and sentiment aside, it seemed to me that, as much as anything else, it was the very difficulty and mystique of traditional framing that commended it to Joe. Since not everybody could do it, those who could were entitled to a special status.

Up until the second half of the nineteenth century, the joiner, or housewright—to use the two terms by which carpenters were then known—possessed the cultural authority and prestige that architects possess today. They ruled the house-building process from design to completion. And the chief source of the housewright’s authority was his expertise in the ways of joining wood timbers, since joinery was easily the most critical and dangerous operation in the making of a building. The status of the carpenter has never fully recovered from the invention of the balloon frame, which replaced posts and beams and mortised joints with slender studs, sills, and joists that just about anybody with a hammer could join with cheap nails. By insisting we mortise our joints, a decision that immediately cast me as his pupil and himself as master, Joe was reclaiming some of the joiner’s lost authority for himself. Without challenging Charlie directly, he had removed the making of my building to a time before architects mattered, when the carpenter was sovereign.

 

The shift from post-and-beam to balloon framing (named for the dubious-seeming lightness of the new structure) marks an important change not only in the history of wood construction, but also in the practice of architecture, the work of building, and even, it seems, in the way that people think about space and place. For between the two types of frame stands a gulf of sensibility as well as technology. This is something my building helped me to at least begin to appreciate, since its frame was a hybrid that acquainted me with both traditions. After Joe and I had raised the front corner posts onto their rock feet and then fitted our floor beams into their notches, we traded our chisels for hammers and nails. The floor, the eighteen-inch “knee wall” at the middle of the building where it stepped down with the ground plane, and the lower sections of its end walls were all to be framed out of conventional two-by-fours and -sixes, in the way most wooden structures have been framed since about 1850 or so.

Now that we were swinging hammers rather than tapping chisels, I felt like I was back on at least semifamiliar ground. But on the first morning of floor framing, I noticed Joe watching me closely as I pounded nails, clearly weighing whether or not to interrupt.

“Can I show you a better way to do that?”

“What—to hammer a nail?” I was incredulous, and then, after he explained what I was doing wrong, crestfallen: it turned out I didn’t even know the proper way to swing a hammer. It seems I was holding the side of the hammer with my thumb, a grip that forced my wrist to deliver most of the force needed to drive the nail. Joe reached over and moved my thumb down around the shank of the hammer. Now as I brought the hammer down I felt a slight loss of control but a substantial gain in power, for suddenly the tool had become an extension of my whole arm and not just my hand. Joe never said it, but I’d been holding my hammer as if it were a tennis racket poised for a backhand, a realization that heated my cheeks with embarrassment. Once I’d corrected my grip, I found I could drive a big, ten-penny nail through a piece of two-by with half as many blows as before (this was still twice as many as it took Joe, however), and the business of framing moved smartly along.

It wasn’t hard to see why balloon framing had caught on. Where it had taken the two of us to raise and manhandle our posts and beams into position, a process akin to standing a tree trunk on a dime (the dime here being the pin jutting up from the rock through the pressure-treated pad), I was able to frame most of the floor and the entire knee wall by myself in considerably less time than it had taken me to chisel a pair of notches. As soon as I acquired the knack of toe-nailing (angling a nail through the tip of a stud or joist and then into a beam), the work just flew. Only after struggling with six-by-ten posts can you understand how carpenters could ever have thought of two-by-four studs as “sticks”—by comparison, these seemed about as light and easy to handle as toothpicks. Almost without looking, I could pick a two-by-four out of the pile (they were more or less interchangeable), mark it for length, cut it, and toe-nail it into place—all by myself.

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.

A few steps from the building sits a large, low boulder Joe often repaired to when he needed to study the plans closely or work through a geometry problem, and now he invited me to join him on his rock for a serious head-scratch. “Didn’t I say we’d used up too much plumb and level on those front posts?” Joe said, straining to lighten a situation he clearly regarded as grim. He was referring to our relative good fortune in raising the front corner posts and framing the lower portion of the floor. Time and time again the little bubble in the level’s window had come to rest dead center in its tube of liquid, an event I learned to await nervously and greet with relief. I’d come to think of the little bubble as a stand-in for people, for our comfortableness in space; level and plumb settled the bubble, stilled its jitteriness, in the same way they settled us, making us feel more at home on the uneven earth.

Joe would often talk about plumb and level and square—trueness—as if they were mysterious properties of the universe, something like luck, or karma, and always in short and unpredictable supply. A surplus one week was liable to lead to a shortfall the next. “We were bound to run out sooner or later, but this, Mike, is grave.” I knew, at least in an intellectual way, that squareness was an important desideratum in a building, but part of me still wasn’t sure why it was such a big deal. If the problem wasn’t evident to the eye, then how much could a few degrees off ninety really matter? Why should builders make such a fetish of right angles—of something as old-fashioned as “rectitude”? I mentioned to Joe there were architects around, called deconstructivists, who maintained that Euclidean geometry was obsolete. They designed spaces that were deliberately out of plumb, square, and sometimes even level, spaces that set out purposefully to confound the level’s little bubble, and in turn our conventional notions of comfort. “Straight,” “level,” “plumb,” “true”: in the postmodern lexicon, these terms are…well, square. So why couldn’t our building afford an acute angle or two? Joe cocked one eye and looked at me darkly, an expression that made plain he regarded my hopeful stab at non-Euclidean geometry as an instance not of apostasy but madness.

“Mike, you don’t even want to know all the problems that a building this far out of square is going to have. Trust me—it is your worst nightmare.”

Sitting there on Joe’s rock, pondering the mystery, we were able to come up with two plausible explanations for what had happened. Both were equally depressing, though in very different ways. Either it was human error in the placement of one of the front posts on its rock, or an act of God involving movement of the rear footings. Earlier that spring we had observed a tremendous amount of groundwater coming through the site (something a fêng shui doctor would doubtless have foreseen). The ground was saturated in March, and as the earth around our footings thawed, we could actually hear gurgling sounds deep underfoot, as if a stream were passing directly beneath us. Could the force of the groundwater actually have moved a four-foot concrete pier? Joe claimed it was possible.

I personally found it difficult to accept that an act of God, or nature, was responsible for throwing our building out of square. To endorse this view might exonerate our workmanship, but it raised too many uncomfortable questions about foundations—about the dependability of the frost line and the very possibility of ever safely grounding a building. I was more inclined to think human error was the cause—what Joe called an “act of idiocy,” as opposed to an act of God—and I worked out a scenario in which a seemingly trivial bit of carelessness in the placement of one of our little pressure-treated post “shoes” could have caused the calamity without our realizing it. I may have been more right than I knew when I said they were the building’s Achilles’ heel.

Thinking back on it, I did have this vagueish memory involving the shoe under the outside northwest post—about how it might have sat a little funny when we put it down on the rock that final time, as if it had been turned around or flipped over. If so, then the entire northwest corner of the building was twisted slightly in space, which would be enough to account for the discrepancies we’d found in the rear posts.

The error, this simple, stupid, unconscious, un-undoable error, haunts my building even now. For although Joe and I were able with great difficulty to make some adjustments in the placement of the rear posts (by shifting where they fell on their rocks, and rotating one of the rocks on its pier), we were never able to entirely rectify the problem—and therefore, the building, which we estimate to be approximately two degrees out of square. As a result, the front wall of my building is slightly more than an inch wider than the back.

Not that it’s anything anyone’s ever going to notice. At the casual, phenomenological level of everyday life, a building a couple degrees out of square is no big deal. Unfortunately for me, that is not the level at which I elected to have this experience. And at the considerably less forgiving level of experience where rafters have to get cut and desktops scribed, it has been exactly what Joe promised it would be: a nightmare. The whole of the rest of the project has been a seminar in the consummate beauty, if not the transcendental necessity, of square, something I now look back upon wistfully as a lapsed state of architectural grace. Cast out of square, I’ve learned more than I care to know about the stern and unforgiving syntax of framing, in which any departure from geometrical rectitude ramifies through the world of the structure without end, a dilating, unstoppable stain, an ineradicable corruption. Every step taken since the flip of that shoe has been dogged by those two degrees: Every pair of rafters has had to be cut to a slightly different length; every floorboard and windowsill, every piece of trim and flashing, has an eighty-eight-degree angle somewhere in it, the indelible watermark of our stupidity. Even now, years later, consequences rear up in reminder. When I want to add another shelf to hold my books, I’m quickly reminded that no straightforward rectangle will do. No, I must lay out and cut, then sand and finish and dismayingly behold, the subtlest of trapezoids, a precise off-key echo of the building as a whole. It has been a most exquisite form of penance.

 

But if framing had given the building its darkest day, cleaving it once and for all from geometrical perfection, it also gave us a few of its brightest: banner days of swift progress and high spirits in which the building literally rose up and took shape before our eyes, almost as if in time-lapse. By Memorial Day, all eight corner posts were standing, along with the upper and lower beams connecting them front to back, and the entire subfloor had been nailed down—faintly trapezoidal, it’s true, but I’m proud to say dead-on, bubble-stillingly level.

The weather that June was particularly fine, and many hands mustered. Especially on the Saturday that spring turned into summer, when Judith and I threw a barbecue for a dozen or so friends that turned the following morning into an impromptu frame-raising party. Those who weren’t at ease swinging hammers stood around the site and gabbed, watching the kids and shooting video of the doings above, while a handful of us climbed up into the frame, under a fine canopy of new leaves, and nailed into place the sweet-smelling planks of freshly cut fir passed up from below. Isaac was two months shy of his first birthday, and I have a snapshot Judith took of the two of us on the site that splendid afternoon. I’m ferrying lumber to the framers from a stockpile in the barn, all the while carrying Isaac in a pack on my back; OSHA would not have approved. Isaac’s got nothing but a diaper on, and his tiny pink hand is reaching up to steady the two-by-six balanced on my shoulder.

Charlie was also on hand, and Joe was due but running more than his usual couple of hours behind schedule. (The man might be a master of space, but time is another matter altogether.) On this occasion, though, there may have been extenuating circumstances. For this was to be Joe and Charlie’s first face-to-face, a prospect neither of them relished.

Before Joe arrived we worked on the foot-wide Doug fir plank that Charlie had spec’d to span the tops of the corners posts and tie all four walls together. Like a great many components of the building’s frame, this one performed several distinct functions at once, some structural, others formal or ornamental. Structurally, the plank functions as the top plate of the walls, stiffening the frame all around while providing a header for the windows and a seat for the rafters. Inside, the same member serves as the topmost bookshelf, articulating the depth and height of the thick walls that run the length of the building’s long sides. Then, at either end of the building, three inches of the plate extend through the wall, jutting out to form a ledge, or lip, on the front and rear elevations, which crowns the corner posts much like a slender cornice. This is its formal role: by establishing a strong, crisp line across the face of the building and defining the base of the pediment, the plank (in combination with the visor in front) gives all the columns something to “die into,” thereby resolving the problem of how to terminate the two inner posts. Charlie prepared an axonometric drawing to show us how the cornice plate was supposed to work:

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The cornice is exactly the sort of elegantly economical detail I might never have appreciated had I not worked on it directly. With the cornice Charlie had pushed the possibilities of “articulated” structure as far as he could, enlisting the building’s frame in the structure of its thick walls and then bringing that interior element out into the design of the exterior elevation. (Though I hasten to add that this is strictly an architect’s concept of economy: Since the detail was so important, Charlie had insisted we build the cornice using the clearest, and very dearest, grade of fir.)

As we waited for Joe to show up, Charlie climbed up into the frame to help me lay out our four planks, a procedure that very quickly brought him up to speed on the whole squareness issue. He was doing his best to be nonchalant about it too, though I could see that so messy and steep a declension from the structure he had drawn clearly disturbed him. From an architect’s point of view, our two-degree lapse outraged acceptable practice, and I was grateful to Charlie for not giving me too hard a time about it. But that did not mean he was prepared to let our mistake compromise the appearance of his building, no matter what the cost in effort or aggravation.

It had been Joe’s and my plan all along to block the spread of out-of-squareness right here, at the plate. By cutting the planks square and then “floating” that perfect rectangle above the imperfect rectangle of our frame, we would “lose” the problem at the top of the walls and thereby preserve our roof from the spread of geometrical imperfection. The advantage of making the cornice square is that it would give us a perfectly symmetrical base on which to erect our two gables, vastly simplifying the job of cutting rafters and framing the roof. But Charlie contended that to do this would be a big mistake. The slight discrepancy between the plane of the walls and the plate above them would “wreck” the cornice, he explained, since its depth (and therefore the conspicuous line of shadow it cast) would vary at every point along its length. “It’s really, really going to bother you,” Charlie said. By “you” he of course meant himself; Charlie had become fully as proprietary about the building as Joe and I were. I couldn’t decide whether it was a good or a bad thing that Joe wasn’t around to argue the point with him.

Charlie wanted us to cut the plates to match the imperfect frame, thereby pushing the squareness problem up into the rafters, where it would be more or less out of view. “I’m not saying it won’t be a headache,” he acknowledged. “You’re going to be cutting every pair of rafters individually, each to a slightly different length. But then—I promise—it’ll be over, the problem won’t go any further than that.” How could it? The building didn’t go any further than that. But it seemed to me that if Charlie felt this strongly about the cornice detail, it was probably wise to go along.

Charlie and I were already nailing down the untrued cornice planks when Joe finally appeared, trudging up the hill to the site elaborately festooned with power tools and extension cords. He had on red, white, and blue suspenders, circa 1969, and a pair of trousers, which immediately set him apart from the weekend carpenters on hand in our shorts. Charlie and I came down off our ladders for the introductions, and the two of them shook hands—carefully. Charlie launched an initial foray into geniality, complimenting Joe on his craftsmanship, but when the gesture wasn’t reciprocated, he promptly chomped a few nails between his teeth, climbed back up his ladder, and returned to the plank he’d been spiking. It was not a comfortable moment, and the news I had for Joe about the planks did not promise to improve it. I remember thinking: Men!

When I told Joe how we’d decided to handle the cornice plate, he gave a shrug of what I knew to be feigned indifference: the two of us had been going back and forth about whether or not to square these planks for weeks as we framed up the side walls, so I knew he had strong feelings on the subject. “Mike, it’s your building,” he now mumbled, by which I was meant to understand, and not Charlie’s. Then he looked up at the architect, swinging his hammer on top of the wall, and invited him to come back and help out again the following weekend, and all the weekends after that, when we’d still be custom-cutting rafters. “Because framing this roof is shaping up as a real good time!”

Charlie laughed off the barb and, to my enormous relief, set to work mollifying Joe. You could see the years of experience smoothing the feathers of all those prickly contractors Charlie’s drawings and directives and punch lists had propelled into orbit. By turns self-deprecating, appreciative, and deferential, Charlie managed within moments to assure Joe he had no intention of challenging his authority on the job site. And by the end of the afternoon, Joe was abundantly himself again, handing out orders to everybody, holding forth on politics (the mendacity of government, the people’s Second Amendment right to bear arms), and offering design suggestions that Charlie accepted with exceptional good grace.

Later that afternoon, after the architect had headed back to Cambridge, Joe told me Charlie was not at all what he’d expected. “He’s almost a regular guy,” Joe said. He seemed genuinely astonished.

 

The episode of the cornice did not mark the cessation of hostilities between Joe and Charlie, however. A certain tenseness would color all their dealings right to the end, now and again flaring in such a way as to strand me uncomfortably in between. I soon learned never to cite Charlie or his plans as a final authority on any question, and always to claim any suggestion from the architect as my own. But Joe wasn’t the only party intent on jealously guarding his prerogatives. If I had occasion to mention to Charlie that Joe and I planned to decide on our own some detail left unclear on the blueprint (the framing of a window, say, or the precise depth of the bookshelf walls), he’d urge us to hold off and then, within hours, fax me a drawing in which Joe would then proceed to poke holes.

What was going on here? The project represented only the tiniest of commissions for Charlie, and for Joe it was only fill-in work, a short-term weekend job. Yet both were behaving as if something much more important were at stake.

Of the two, Joe’s investment in the project was somewhat easier to fathom. For one or two days every week, and provided Charlie stayed in Cambridge, Joe enjoyed a measure of freedom and authority he had probably never known on the job. He was the foreman, the brains of the operation, the mentor—and I met the payroll. Plus he got to give an architect a hard time whenever he felt like it, evening an ancient score on behalf of carpenters everywhere. You don’t find too many deals quite this sweet.

On most construction sites today, the battle between architects and contractors is largely past, if not forgotten. Carpenters may still grumble, but only among themselves, and rarely to any effect; everyone understands that, really, the game is over, and it was the architects who won. Carpenters might still possess a greater degree of autonomy than other workers in an industrial economy, but their authority is a ghost of what it was. In many respects my job was a throwback. The complexity of the design combined with my own inexperience put Joe in a position of unusual power, and never more so than during the work of framing. His role was much like that of the housewright of old, who was typically the only “expert” in a house-raising, directing a crew of amateurs nearly as rank as I. To watch Joe up in the frame, moving from beam to beam with a simian agility, barking orders, galvanizing a crew of incompetents in a procedure as intricate as the raising of a roof, was to watch a carpenter in his glory—and to have some idea what the glory days of the trade must have been like.

But if the carpenter lost out in the war with architects, then what exactly had the architects won? This question helped me to at least begin to understand what my building meant to Charlie. Certainly an architect wields far greater authority than a carpenter. Yet unless he happens to be one of a small handful of stars, his authority too is heavily checked and compromised—by the whims of clients, the imperatives of the marketplace, the dominion of the building code, the rule of popular taste. To the extent that money is a measure of power, the fact that architects are frequently the poorest paid of all the trades on a construction site indicates that the victory of the profession might be, if not hollow, then certainly less resounding than the popular image of the autonomous architect-artist would suggest. The architect as romantic hero has been a powerful stereotype for most of this century, but I think most architects today understand it as the myth that it is. To an architect of Charlie’s generation, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, a character whose name you can’t pronounce without hearing the word “heroic,” is a figure of fun.

And yet that figure—solitary and utterly uncompromising as he bends the world to his visionary purposes—is perhaps more alluring to architects than they can safely let on. For who wouldn’t want the career of the romantic hero-artist, breaking free of the shackles of budget and client and marketplace? It’s one thing to know better, to understand that architecture is in fact—as it should be—an impure and collaborative art form, but it’s quite another to give up completely such a seductive image—the very image, in all likelihood, that attracted you to architecture in the first place.

Maybe I shouldn’t speak for Charlie, but I imagine that the “writing house” commission stirred whatever romantic inclinations he might still harbor. In a practice demanding more than its share of prose, the writing house offered at least the chance for poetry. The client had pretty much given the architect his head, the program had an unusual simplicity to it, and there were so few of the usual earthbound considerations to worry about: no plumbing, no insulation, and not a whole lot of building code. In a more conventional project, a detail as elegant as a cornice that passes through the building’s skin would almost certainly have been sacrificed to the prosaic need for thickly insulated walls. Freed from such mundane considerations, Charlie could articulate whatever of the building’s structure he wanted to, and in doing so design an uncommonly pure work of architecture, his own personal interpretation of the primitive hut.

From one perspective Charlie and Joe would appear to have much in common here—not in their interests, which were bound to clash, but in their motives and aspirations. Both had found in the writing house a degree of freedom and authority, of power really, such as their workaday lives rarely afforded. On this tiny stage, both could play the hero. (And at my expense, in every sense of the word.) The only problem was, the heroism of one had to contend with the heroism of the other.

Leaving aside these conflicts, as well as my own junior status, the project offered all three of us many of the same satisfactions. There was a measure of poetry in the work itself, if only in the sense that we were doing it freely and for ourselves, with no thought to the marketplace. And this was real work too, something more than mere labor—time put in for pay. It was work with a clear beginning, middle, and end. At the end we would have something to show for it, would have added something to the stock of reality—to what Hannah Arendt once called the “huge arsenal of the given.” In The Human Condition Arendt writes of the privileged position of homo faber, man the maker of things, whom the Greeks believed stood not only above the laborer, but above even the man of action and the man of thought, or words. The laborer produces nothing lasting he can call his own, and both the man of action and the man of thought are ultimately dependent on other people, without whose regard and remembrance their deeds and creations do not matter or endure. “Homo faber is indeed a lord and master,” she writes, “not only because he…has set himself up as the master of all nature but because he is master of himself and his doings.” At one time or another I think all three of us felt a glimmer of that mastery; we just had to take turns.

 

The culmination of timber framing arrives with the raising of the ridge pole, a moment of high drama that Joe approached as one of his biggest scenes. For weeks now, I’d been asking him how we were going to do it—should I be lining up some sort of crane for the day?—and for weeks Joe’d been telling me not to worry, that he’d figure out something when the time came. But it was definitely on his mind. During breaks, I’d follow his gaze as it slowly traveled up from the wall plate to the overhanging trees only to suddenly plunge again; I guessed he was testing out scenarios (a block and tackle? Maybe a pulley?), running calculations on what it would take to lift a four-by-ten ridge beam sixteen feet overhead. What I wanted to know was, did the rafters come first, or the ridge beam? It looked like a classic chicken-and-egg problem to me: Without a ridge beam, what’s to hold the rafters in place? And without rafters to hold the ridge beam up, it seemed like you’d need to temporarily levitate the thing. To me, it looked like another pyramid deal: inconceivable without a really big rig and a lot of guys. But if Joe was nervous about it—and I think he was, a little—he did a good job of hiding it, all the while building suspense in his rapt audience of one.

On the July Saturday we proposed to raise the roof beam, Joe showed up before eight, brimming with determination and confidence. We began indoors, framing the two end gables. Joe worked his pencil, calculating lengths and angles, then called these out to me; I manned the table saw. Before a single nail was driven, we laid the whole assembly out on the floor. Each gable was an isosceles right triangle consisting of a four-by-six rafter on each of two sides, a cross beam of the same dimension (known as a collar tie) along the base, and a four-by-four king post down the middle.

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At the apex of this triangle we left a 31½?-by-9? gap between the two rafters and above the post: This was the slot in which the four-by-ten ridge pole would ultimately sit. The one-word answer to my chicken-and-egg riddle was “plywood”: we nailed a triangle of half-inch ply to the back of these members to keep them fixed in place until the ridge pole was up. Joe at last unveiled his plan: We would raise the gables into place at either end of the building and then drop the ridge pole into their two pockets. Only after that would we nail the rest of the rafters into place. It sounded to me as though you still wanted the crane (the gable ends themselves weighed several hundred pounds a piece), but Joe said all we would need was one more pair of hands, no particular skill required. So I arranged for an exceptionally tall friend named Don to come by later that afternoon.

The gable ends themselves presented a complicated bit of framing. Owing to our squareness problem, the rear gable had to be an inch and a half narrower than the front, which meant we had to cut the bird’s mouth, or notch, on each of the two pairs of rafters at a slightly different spot in order to maintain the same pitch from one end of our roof to the other. (The precise location of these cuts was determined by a complicated formula that Joe worked out to his satisfaction on a scrap of plywood but failed to make intelligible to me.) Then we doweled the joints where the rafters and king post each met the cross beam, pounding a cylinder of hardwood through holes drilled into each member; the dowels would help prevent the roof from splaying outward under the weight of snow.

Typical of this building’s design, the gable mixed traditional and modern stud-framing techniques. For nested within the beefy timbers forming the three sides of the gable was a second pattern of lighter members, two-by-fours that held the wall rigid and framed the pair of boxes that would eventually hold the little windows under the peak. Once we had mitered and nailed together these pieces, the gable assemblies were ready to be raised. Somehow.

We carried the first gable out to the site and laid it down on the subfloor. Joe spent a long time just staring up at the top of the wall and then down at the gable. The assembly was far too heavy to be simply passed up onto the wall plate without a small army of helpers top and bottom. Joe now carefully arranged a pair of ladders and set a two-by-ten plank across the tops of the walls; I could see that the trees overhead no longer figured in his calculations.

“Okay, Mike, here’s the plan. First we turn the gable upside down and backwards. Then, together, we lift the thing just high enough so that this rafter tail here hits that spot there on the plate. You’re going to have to balance everything right on that point just long enough for me to climb up onto the top of the wall. Then we pivot the whole assembly this way until the other rafter tail hits that point over there, and then slide the two-by-ten under the peak to hold it up. Follow me? Then I steady the assembly while you get up on the second ladder there, and together we flip the thing around, shimmy it into place, and then get under and lift it to vertical.” No, it made no sense to me either, none whatsoever. I told Joe following his plan was like trying to learn origami over the radio. He wasn’t smiling, and I realized then that what we were about to attempt was not without danger. I said to Joe that maybe it would be better if he just told me what to do one step at a time.

And so I followed his instructions, moving first this way and then that, hoisting, holding, pivoting, and then climbing on cue, an obedient pyramid ant, not even aspiring to grasp the big picture, and trusting utterly in my carpenter-turned-choreographer. And then, astoundingly, there we were, each of us holding one side of a three-hundred-pound assembly that we’d managed somehow to raise high into the trees without a crane. I wanted to cheer, except that I was still holding my breath as I waited for Joe to brace the gable. So instead I thought about this newspaper article I’d read recently that said that men are more adept than women at mentally rotating an object in space, a skill I’d never had occasion to think about, much less appreciate, before. Women supposedly have the edge in verbal agility, which seemed much the better deal. Not today. Here it was, right in front of me, a full-dress display of the male genius.

We braced the gable with a pair of two-by-fours, and broke for lunch.

 

It was imperative we get the ridge pole up before the day was out; without it, an errant gust was liable to make a sail of our gable assembly, bring the whole thing crashing down. After lunch we raised the second gable without incident and took a field measurement to determine the precise length of the ridge pole: 13’ 9¼”. This turned out to be a couple of inches less than the dimension shown on Charlie’s plan, but then at this point the building had its own reality, of which our mistakes formed a necessary part.

Don, the six-and-a-half-foot friend I’d recruited for the event, arrived as Joe and I were preparing to mark and cut the gorgeous length of knot-free fir we’d selected for the building’s spine. This timber too had come from Oregon, according to the stencil on its flank. My tentativeness handling such a piece of wood had vanished; I felt well acquainted with fir—if not quite friend, not foe either. I took up the circular saw, found my mark, and worked the blade through the familiar wood flesh, breathing in its sweet fairground scent. Don, who has some of the lassitude you often find in very lanky people, seemed slightly horrified at just how big the beam was.

This is what you call a ridge pole? I was picturing something a bit more bamboolike.”

“We call it a ridge pole to make it feel lighter,” Joe said. “But it’s really a big tree with the bark taken off and a few corners added.”

As the three of us shouldered the ridge pole from the barn out to the site, I thought back to the arrival of the corner posts on a winter morning six months before. Everything about this day seemed infinitely superior: the soft July air, the auspiciousness of the occasion, and the convenient fact that, this time around, mine was not the tallest shoulder underneath this massive tree. Don complained all the way out to the site.

Joe had stationed himself midway between Don and me, but as we neared the site he slipped out from under the beam (since he’s five-four, our burden scarcely changed) and trotted out ahead, climbing up into the frame to receive the ridge pole from us. Don, straining, pressed his end up over his head barbell-style while Joe guided it to a spot on the wall plate; then I did the same with my end. Working now nine feet off the ground, we drilled holes at each end of the ridge beam at the spot where it would set down onto the dowels we’d already mounted on the supporting king posts in our gable assemblies. Joe then directed the two of us in a new choreography of lumber that had Don and I manning opposite gables while he flew back and forth across the frame, helping us each in turn to hoist and then align our beam ends over their intended dowels. Don’s end went down first, sinking comfortably into its wooden pocket; I watched his tensed expression suddenly bloom into relief, mixed with a satisfaction he hadn’t been prepared for. My end took some manhandling, first to align the hole above the dowel, and then to force the beam all the way down into its slot, where it didn’t seem to want to go.

“Time for some physical violence,” Joe advised, and he handed his big framing hammer up to me. Now I pounded mightily on the top of the ridge beam—holding the hammer correctly, I might add—and inch by inch it creaked its way down onto the dowel, the tight-binding wood screeching furiously under the blows, until at last the beam came to rest on its king post, snug and immovable. That was it: the ridge pole set, our frame was topped out.

I asked Joe to hand me his big carpenter’s level; along with the tool he gave me a look that said, You’re really asking for it, aren’t you? There was nothing we could do, after all, if we discovered that our ridge beam was not true. I laid the level along the spine of the building as close to its midpoint as I could reach. From where he stood Joe had the better view into the level’s little window, and I read the excellent news in his face. “It doesn’t get any better,” Joe said, reaching out his hand for a slap. None of us wanted to come down from the frame, so we stood up there in the trees for a long time, beaming dumbly at one another, weary and relieved, savoring the sweetness of the moment.

 

In Colonial days the topping out of a frame was traditionally followed by a ceremony, and though the particulars varied from place to place and over time, certain elements turn up in most accounts. According to historian John Stilgoe, as soon as the ridge beam was set into place, the weary carpenters would begin pounding on the frame, “calling for wood.” Answering the call, the master builder would go off into the woods to cut down a young conifer and carry it back to the assembled helpers. As the tree sacrifice suggests, the flavor of these events was strongly pagan, even in Puritan America, though there was an effort in many places to work in a few Christian elements, such as the Lord’s Prayer. Often there would be some kind of test of divination: in one, the master builder would drive an iron spike into an oak beam, and if the wood didn’t split or bleed (being oak, it hardly ever did), the long life of both frame and owner was assured. Toasts and prayers followed, and then a bottle would be broken over the frame in a kind of christening. Many frames were actually given names; “the Flower of the Plain” was one I especially liked. After a toast to the workers and their creation, writes Stilgoe, “The harmony of builders, frame, and nature was assured, and the men raised the decorated conifer to the highest beam in the structure and temporarily fixed it. Thereafter the frame had the life of a living tree.”

“Keep all lightning and storms distant from this house,” went one common prayer, “keep it green and blossoming for all posterity.”

The only part of the traditional topping-out ceremony that has come down to us more or less intact is the nailing of the evergreen to the topmost beam. Even on a balloon-frame split-level in the suburbs, you’ll often see an evergreen bough tacked to the gable or ridge board before the vinyl siding goes on. I’ve seen steelworkers raising whole spruce trees to the top of a skyscraper frame high above midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it’s nothing more than superstition, men in a dangerous line of work playing it safe. Or maybe there’s some residual power left in the old pagan ritual.

I’ve read many explanations for the evergreen hanging, and all of them are spiritual in one degree or another. The conifer is thought to imbue the frame with the tree spirit, or it’s meant to sanctify the home, or to appease the gods for the taking of the trees that went into the frame. These interpretations sound reasonable enough, and yet they don’t account for the fact that someone as unsuperstitious and spiritually backward as me felt compelled to go out into the woods in search of an evergreen after we’d raised the ridge pole. Joe probably would have done it if I hadn’t, but it was my building, and there was something viscerally appealing about the whole idea, the way it promised to lend a certain symmetry to the whole framing experience, tree to timber to tree, bringing it full circle. But now that I’ve performed the ritual, I’m inclined to think there may be more to it than that. Like many rituals involving a sacrifice, there’s a kind of emotional wrench in the middle of this one. The hanging of the conifer manages all at once to celebrate a joyful rite—the achievement of the frame and the inauguration of a new dwelling—and to force a recognition that there is something slightly shameful in the very same deed.

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human—in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice—of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves—appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls “the beauty we have paid for with our shame.” Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it’s not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature. For who can hold in his head at the same time a feeling of shame at the cutting down of a great oak, and a sense of pride at the achievement of a good building? It doesn’t seem possible.

And yet right here may lie the deeper purpose of the topping-out ceremony: to cultivate that impossible dual vision, to help foster what amounts to a tragic sense of what we do in nature. This is something that I suspect the people who used to christen frames understood better than we do. To build, their rituals imply, is in some way to alienate ourselves from the natural order, for good and bad. The cutting down of trees was an important part of it. But even before that came the need for a shelter in the first place—something that Adam had no need for in paradise. Like the clothes Adam and Eve were driven by shame to put on, the house is an indelible mark of our humanity, of our difference from both the animals and the angels. It is a mark of our weakness and power both, for along with the fallibility implied in the need to build a shelter, there is at the same time the audacity of it all—reaching up into the sky, altering the face of the land. After Babel, building risked giving offense to God, for it was a usurpation of His creative powers, an act of hubris. That, but this too: Look at what our hands have made!

I don’t think it is an accident that the ceremonies came at the point they did in the building process, since it is the setting of the ridge beam that completes the shape of this symbol of our humanity: the gable crowning the square, the very idea of house written out in big timbers for all the world to see. The topping-out rituals performed by the early builders, with their peculiar mix of solemnity and celebration, must have offered them a way to reconcile the simultaneous shame and nobility of this great and dangerous accomplishment.

I’m more than a little embarrassed to utter any such words in connection with my own endeavor, so distant from my world do they sound. But along with the remnants of the old rituals, might there also be at least some residue of the old emotions? I remember, on that January morning when I took delivery of my fir timbers, how the sight of those fallen, forlorn timbers on the floor of my barn had unnerved me—“abashed” was the word I’d used. In the battle between the loggers and the northern spotted owl, I’d always counted myself firmly on the side of the owls. But now that I wanted to build, here I was, quite prepared to sacrifice not only a couple of venerable fir trees in Oregon, but a political conviction as well. I was also prepared to make a permanent mark on the land.

So maybe it was shame as much as exultation that brought me down off the frame that early summer evening, sent me out into the woods in quest of an evergreen to kill. Joe had forgotten which you were supposed to use, pine or hemlock or spruce. I decided any conifer would do. It was spruce I came upon first, and after I cut the little tree down and turned to start back to the site, holding the doomed sapling before me like a flag, I saw something I hadn’t really seen before: the shape of my building in the landscape. The simple, classical arrangement of posts and beams, their unweathered grain glowing in the last of the day’s light, stood in sharp relief against the general leafiness, like some sort of geometrical proof, chalked on a blackboard of forest. I stopped for a moment to admire it, and I filled with pride. The proof, of course, was of us: of the powers—of mind, of body, of civilization—that could achieve such a transubstantiation of trees. Look at this thing we’ve made! And yet nothing happens without the gift of the firs, those green spires sinking slowly to earth in an Oregon forest, and it was this that the spruce recalled me to. Joe had left a ladder leaning against the front gable. I climbed back up into the canopy of leaves, the sapling tucked under my arm, and when I got to the top I drove a nail through its slender trunk and fixed it to the ridge beam, thinking: Trees!