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 constitutes 95% of residential construction in North America today, making it 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 the subject of generations of architects’ lofty experiments.
The Trubek and Wislocki Houses by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are one such experiment, self-consciously studying, mimicking and altering the traditional light-framed fisherman’s cottage. The shingle-clad seaside houses, which appear modest and ordinary at first glance, reveal, upon closer inspection, curious details: an extremely oversized window, a chamfered corner and misaligned floors.
“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 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 used to create openings, attachments and continuity, all of which deviate from normative framing conventions. It calls attention to the shims, blocking and stiffeners that are uniquely crafted in the field, but never drawn.
The accompanying light box, constructed using the same system as the house, displays the documents used both 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 and revealing the bureaucratic and technocratic review process required to produce dimensional lumber.
“Complexity and Contradiction in the Trubek and Wislocki Houses” explores the blurry line that serves as a divide between architecture and construction, and the material culture that determines the degree of abstraction in design training.
