Tedd Benson

I grew up in a timber frame house constructed of red oak posts and beams harvested out of our 33-acre wood. In my early adulthood, he and I timber framed a wood shed together. And a couple years ago, I ended up settling down in a timber frame, also constructed of oak.

My partner has been thinking about building a cabin, so my dad gave me a small pile of books for ideas. This happened to be one of them.

This book was published in 1999. In some ways, it represents one zenith of Benson's career (I notice from his website that he is now focusing on passive houses). Many of the structures in this book are almost gaudy—5,000-square-foot monsters. Along these lines, I'd say the one chapter of the book that is missing would be one on timber-frame cabins.

This is "coffee-table" book in that it is mostly pictures, has an elegant structure, and is just as well paged through for ten minutes as it is read cover to cover.

Like Morris Dancing and tracker pipe organs (two other crafts I know a bit about), timber framing both has a storied heritage, and all but died out in the eighteen hundreds, to see a resurgence in the 1970s. Timber framing is about wood in a way that the stick-frame building is not, in that it is impossible to look at these structures without pondering the stories of the trees from which they are constructed. Benson highlights this by working almost exclusively with reclaimed wood in the structures he highlights in this text. It is also a construction style demanding of superior craft.

One shortcoming of many timber frame structures—Benson's and my own included—is their open floor-plans. There is no reason that timber frame's can't have multiple rooms with doors in-between them, and yet, for some reason, the open floor-plan predominates.

As Benson states he intends to do at the outset, this book illustrates a wide range of architectural styles that are possible with timber framing. Timber framing, similar to roofing, is too broad of a technique to be considered an architectural style (although many see it as such today).

In this book, Benson extensively quotes Michael Pollan's 1997 text, "A Place of My Own." So that's what I'm reading next.… (más)