Throughout the academic year, Tiffany Xu, the school’s tenth Boghosian Fellow, has taught an architecture studio and two professional electives focused on researching North American contemporary construction culture—emphasizing architecture as a layered system consisting of a skeletal frame and built-up finishes, materials based on standardized dimensions and a product-like treatment of components.
Xu, along with Erin Besler, will moderate a conversation and Q&A following the exhibition opening.
Complexity and Contradiction in the Trubek and Wislocki Houses
Light timber framing makes up 95% of residential construction in North America today, such that it is a universal medium used by trained designers, lay hobbyists and speculative developers alike. Stick framing is at once vernacular and avant garde; it is both a practical solution and an object of generations of architects’ lofty experiments.
The Trubek and Wislocki Houses by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is one such experiment that self consciously studies, mimics and alters the traditional light-framed fisherman’s cottage. The shingle-clad seaside houses that appear modest and ordinary at first reveal curious details such as an extremely oversize window, chamfered corner, and misaligned floors upon sustained look.
“Complexity and Contradiction in the Trubek and Wislocki Houses” investigates the workings of these details at two registers: 1- the embodied labor of their production and 2- the infrastructure of regulating softwood harvesting. The installation offers a way to consider Venturi and Scott Brown’s fixation on complexity and contradiction through the lens of construction culture and material provenance. The 1/2 scale partial framing model stands unclad, highlighting the idiosyncratic methods for creating openings, attachments, and creating continuity that deviate from typical framing conventions, and calls attention to the shims, blocking, and stiffeners that are uniquely crafted in the field, but never drawn and assumed to be part of the builder’s repertoire of skill. The accompanying light box, made up of the same construction system as the house, shows the documents required to build these details and to harvest softwood from managed forests. The approximately 700 pages of reports and correspondence that make up a typical Timber Harvest Plan permit are stacked on the box, spatializing the bureaucratic and technocratic review process required to produce dimensional lumber. “Complexity and Contradiction in the Trubek and Wislocki Houses” explores the blurry boundary between architecture and construction, and the material culture that determines the degree of abstraction in design training.
