A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder

by Michael Pollan

  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I wanted; the rigid syntax of timber framing that insisted on a heavy post every eight or sixteen feet had been repealed, and the specialized skills of the joiner suddenly counted for less than those of the architect.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 for
ests 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: Ever
y 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.