Ben Rahn - The Modern A-Frame

The Modern
A
Frame

Photography by Ben Rahn

Introduction by Chad Randl

The Modern A-Frame

Digital Edition 1.0

Text 2018 Gibbs Smith Publisher

Introduction 2018 Chad Randl

Photographs 2018 Ben Rahn

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Gibbs Smith

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Layton, Utah 84041

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ISBN: 978-1-4236-4764-5

When I started my architectural photography studio, I called it A-Frame so wed be first in the phone book. Its great how things come full circle.

Ben Rahn

Design ideas come and go. They rise up through a combination of forcesthe persistence of influential or determined advocates, a resonance with the spirit of the age, editors looking for good copy and alluring images. Then they fall away, almost imperceptibly at first, as the concept moves from startlingly new to conventional, from challenging the status quo to being the status quo. As an idea becomes common and then clich, early promoters lose interest or even disown it. Only after a period of time and forgetting might the idea reemerge. A new generation, motivated by admiration for the ideas merits or nostalgia for the era that it evokes picks it up and reinterprets its meaning through contemporary priorities and tastes.

The triangular building is one such idea. Born of a neolithic search for shelter, it was also utilized as storehouse, stable, and shrine. Mostly forgotten by the early twentieth century, enough precedents survived to trace the lineage of a new revival. Finding new use as a base for recreation, the A-frame became one of the most recognizable (and malleable) building forms of the 1950s70s, typifying an era of optimism, abundance, and play. Then triangular design seemed to disappearfrom the preferences of tastemakers, from the pages of magazines, from popular consciousness, if not from the landscape. In recent years, the reemergence of the A-frame has been marked less by the construction of entirely new examples and more the rehabilitation and creative adaption of designs dating from that postwar boom.

Its little wonder such an unassuming building appeared on so many disparate points of the globe across the span of millennia. The angle of excavated postholes demonstrate the ancient presence of structures assembled of opposing rows of beams tilted to meet at a point overhead and with a covering that served as both walls and roof. Japanese tenchi-kongen forms set into the ground, pole and thatch houses of New Guinea set on platforms above ground, and Scandinavian sadeltakshus saddle roof houses all shared this triangular shape. Its beams and covering were made with whatever material was readily at hand, from bamboo to birch, from sod to wood shingles. Gable ends were enclosed with wattle and daub, or plank, or brick. Vernacular builders appreciated the triangular buildings combination of structural strength and efficiency, but they must have also liked its geometric purity and symbolic potency.

A remodeled 1959 A-frame in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range serves as the full-time residence to a family of four in Olympic Valley, California.

These same attributes appealed to designers such as Bruno Taut and Rudolf Schindler who picked up the form in the first decades of the twentieth century. An Austrian migr to Southern California and protg of Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler was a central proponent of modern architecture. During the 1920s and 1930s he designed a number of triangular structures that demonstrated his interest in integrating form technology and contemporary materials. His Gisela Bennati Cabin built on a hillside above Lake Arrowhead, California, with its innovative use of plywood, glazed gable ends, and open loft interior was a clear precursor to the thousands that would follow.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States enjoyed a period of unprecedented economic expansion that brought leisure time and disposable income to ever larger portions of the population. Second cars and second televisions were followed by second homes built on shorelines and newly carved ski resorts. A playful design vocabulary seemed appropriate for this new recreation environment and architects responded, extending Schindlers experimentation with triangular forms. MIT architecture student Henrik Bull developed an influential example cantilevered over the slopes in Stowe, Vermont; Andrew Geller nestled a version like driftwood among the dunes of a Long Island beach. San Francisco designers John Campbell, Worley Wong, and Terry Tong developed an early triangular house kit consisting of all the materials weekend carpenters needed to build their own including precut lumber, hardware, and nails.

The publication of these versions in influential magazines such as Arts & Architecture and Sunset introduced the trend to ever larger audiences. By the 1960s, national wood product companies and local lumber yards were producing plan books and prefabricated kits. The term A-frame came into widespread use and, because of the ideas popularity, came to encompass any structure with a steeply pitched roof. The A-frames spread was not limited to the United States as the form again reasserted a global presence. Postwar A-frame vacation homes were built from the Alps to Argentina and Australia, as in the past, utilizing local materials to both practical and aesthetic ends.

Partly due to its association with prosperity and the good life, partly because its form was instantly recognizable, the A-frame also had considerable commercial appeal. Triangular motel offices, pet stores, and gas stations appeared along shopping strips from coast to coast. Fast food chains such as Whataburger and Der Wienerschnitzel developed A-frame motifs for their outlets. Prominent roofs illuminated by floodlights and painted bright red and orange served as enormous billboards distinguishing these establishments from others, luring cars off the road, and sticking in the minds of consumers. To some, the skyward reach of the A-frame was a spiritual evocation. Places of worship, including Eero Saarinens chapel at Concordia Theological Seminary in Indiana, the Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel in Colorado, and others in South Korea, Norway, and elsewhere, utilized the triangular form, likening it to hands folded in prayer.

A 1964 A-frame in northeast Portland stands at 3,000 square feet and is a year and a half into an extensive interior remodel.

Then, for more than two decades starting in the mid-1970s, the A-frame became a formula non grata. Poisoned by its own popularity, the A-frame saw a precipitous drop in interest and cool factor. Arbiters of taste considered it tired and dated as new recreation typologies and practices emerged. Resort condos and homes with conventional forms and year-round amenities replaced quirky cabins and cottages intended for seasonal use. Perhaps there was nothing more damning to the onceavant garde credentials of triangular design than to be reproduced as a fast food restaurant or as a childrens toy (Fisher-Prices Little People A-frame doll house was introduced in 1974). The 1970s energy crisis dealt a further blow, increasing the cost of travel to distant vacation spots and the cost of climate controlling A-frames that (with open interiors, lack of insulation, and unventilated ceilings) were notoriously difficult to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer.