Plywood at 100
"Bright Impertinences": A History of the Mid-20th Century Plywood Vacation Home Fad
By Chad Garrett Randl
Editor's Note: The following article was originally presented by the author at an annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Richmond, Virginia. It is published here as one in a series of Engineered Wood Journal articles commemorating the 100th anniversary of the softwood plywood industry next year.
The 1950s and '60s was the era of the "second everything." Postwar prosperity had already made second televisions, second bathrooms and second cars expected accoutrements of middle-class American life. Now, signs at the hardware store and ads in popular magazines were declaring, "Every family needs two homes! … one for the work-week, one for pure pleasure."1 Increases in disposable income and free time combined with a new culture of leisure, the building of roads through recreation areas and cost-saving innovations in building materials and techniques had sparked a vacation home boom.
Many of these homes were based upon forms traditional to wilderness settings: the log cabin, the clapboarded cottage or utilitarian shack. On the opposite side were high-style boxes with flat roofs and glass facades. But for those wanting a place that was innovative and exciting, modern yet warm, a place wholly suited to the informal recreation lifestyle, a third alternative had emerged. Beginning in the early 1950s, a new type of vacation home had appeared, one that favored dynamic structural forms, unconventional roof shapes, open plans and creative glazing schemes.
Their designers sought to produce dramatic structures with limited resources, goals that often proved complimentary as tight budgets spurred creativity and modest size encouraged experimentation. The result was a democratized modernism more likely found in the pages of Better Homes and Gardens and Popular Mechanics than in the "official" architectural press. Designed as both custom-built models and precut kits intended for mass production, they were built coast to coast, a national phenomenon in which regional variation was subordinated to a shared view of leisure-time living.
These homes, more than traditional cabins or even International style beach houses, were designed for and were a product of this leisure culture. They were presented as backdrops for skiing, sailing, swimming or sunbathing. Unencumbered by the requirements that a permanent home must accommodate, these structures were uniquely suited for their function, the informal enjoyment of free time in natural surroundings. As the magazine Living for Young Homemakers observed in 1961, "Vacation retreats are providing the ideal chance for designer and owner to unshackle all inhibitions. Fanciful expressions are popping up like bright impertinences against the conventional landscape. Houses and shelters are becoming more and more adventurous in themselves, inspired by shapes and forms that stir the imagination and invite the spirit to get away from it all."2
Toward a Contemporary Style
Though by definition the designers of "modern vacation homes" strived for originality and variation of form, a number of shared characteristics emerged. Most were between 400 and 1,000 square feet and cost between $3,000 and $10,000 at a time when new permanent homes averaged $33,000. Almost invariably, they were constructed of wood, including a host of plywoods, laminated beams, boards and panel products. Over time, a set of solutions bordering on a common vocabulary developed for the treatment of the structural form, roof shapes, glazing options and floor plans of modern vacation homes.
The design's exterior form defined the structure at first glance. Some were octagonal or round, others wedge-shaped or broken into connected pavilions. A large percentage, however, were based on a simple square or rectangular shape. These basic forms had inherent economies that few designers could resist. They packed the largest amount of living space within the smallest amount of exterior walls; they were easier to heat and more readily expandable. Rectilinear shapes organized by the four by eight foot plywood module also reduced waste lumber and offered less complicated construction. The challenge was to make a box not look like a box.
When the vacation home was based upon the square, the simplest way to conceal the shape was to cap it with an unconventional roof form.3 Life magazine likened the result to "shoe boxes that had been stepped on."4 The playfulness of roof shapes set modern vacation homes apart from by-then-clich?lat-roofed structures and traditional year round houses. Experimentation with unorthodox roof forms indicated the branch of modernism from which vacation homes drew their inspiration. The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen and John Lautner similarly employed unusual and dynamic roof configurations out of a fascination with geometry, an appreciation of spatial variety and the search for a brand of modernism that was responsive to human needs and sensitive to surroundings.
During the 1950s, innovative roof design infused commercial, institutional and civic architecture. Coming up with new versions seemed a rite of passage for aspiring architects. The folded plates, hyperbolic paraboloids, cylindrical and spherical shells, batwings, and saddles were also adapted and applied to modern vacation homes. In addition to distracting from the basic square forms beneath, these roofs effectively spanned the typical vacation home interior that had few or no partitions, and supported heavy snow loads without needing additional support.
While roof forms were essential in shaping the exterior appearance of the contemporary vacation home, they also helped define interior spaces. Structural beams, joists and plank sheathing were left exposed to clearly articulate the roof shape on the inside, often with dramatic results. In many designs, the angles and shifting pitches of the ceiling directed attention toward the view through a glazed wall or gable end.
Floor plans were laid out to complement the contours of these cathedral ceilings. The main living area was always the largest (and sometimes the only) room in the house. In two-story structures it was often open the full height with cooking and bathing facilities in the rear, beneath a bedroom loft space. Hallways were rare in most designs. Rooms opened into the main living area, with shoji screens or curtains sometimes forming the only partitions. A central tenant of modern architecture, open plans were especially suited to vacation homes. They allowed views through the main glazed wall to be visible throughout the house, were easier to keep warm in the winter and lent a feeling of spaciousness to what were in actuality, quite small structures.
Examining the work of two architects who made their careers developing modest, modern vacation homes will further illustrate the ways in which characteristic structural shapes, roof forms, plans and materials were used.
Plan Books and Magazines
For those who could not or chose not to hire the services of an architect, modern vacation homes were still within reach. Magazines and plan books were common sources for working drawings that were taken to a local contractor or used by do-it-yourself enthusiasts to construct the home themselves. Designs published by building product companies and trade associations relied heavily on materials that the organizations manufactured and hoped to sell – plywood, Homasote panels, Masonite. Potential buyers could also visit lumber yards and hardware stores that sold basic shells as precut or prefabricated kits ready for fitting out by the owner or a hired builder. The range of plans, plan books, kits and packages suggests the large number of companies that sought to profit from the vacation home's popularity. For many businesses, grown fat on a postwar suburban housing boom that was now beginning to ebb, this latest trend came at just the right time.
The Douglas Fir Plywood Association, or DFPA (now APA – The Engineered Wood Association), was among the earliest to tap the growing vacation home market. Representing a number of timber companies, it was the first such organization to distribute a plan book (in 1958), work with a magazine to build and showcase a model vacation home, and to host a conference for developers and builders interested in the vacation home market. Their book, "Leisure-Time Homes of Fir Plywood," presented five modest-sized designs, all exhibiting to varying degrees, the features and forms of the modern vacation home. Helped along by a thorough ad campaign in Saturday Evening Post, Popular Mechanics and other magazines, the book was an immediate success.
All of the homes were designed to ensure easy and rapid construction. The four-foot plywood module can be clearly discerned. In several, it is used overtly to organize the exterior surface and function as an exterior sheathing, where the publisher optimistically claimed it would, "weather to the glistening caste of driftwood." Panelized construction allowed for much of the structure to be built in a garage or factory before shipping it to the home site.5
Five years later, DFPA issued a revised edition of the plan book with twenty-two designs, including the Shoreline Homarina by Milton Schwartz, and the Budget Priced Dream Cabin. By 1963, the association had received over 300,000 requests for drawings.6 Meanwhile, other trade associations like the Western Wood Products Association and the Southern Pine Association joined the fray, along with home plan publishing companies and manufacturers from Georgia-Pacific and Masonite to Richmond-based Reynolds Aluminum, each offering their own versions of the modern vacation home.
Because these books and articles were aimed at a national audience with a range of preferences, even their "fresh," "interesting," and "unusual" homes were generally more tame than those by Andrew Geller, Henrik Bull and other well-known architects working for individual clients. Women's Day counseled architects that all the designs in their magazine "...have had a strong element of the unusual without being crazy. They give the impression of being fun houses where the owner changes his personality and looses his tensions."7 The DFPA described the type as, "conservatively radical."8 Particularly well-publicized custom designs were often reworked for the plan and kit markets. For example, the 1965 book New Holiday Homes featured two designs that, with square plans hidden beneath diamond-shaped roofs and glazed corners framing the central living spaces, were clear derivations of Henrik Bull's Klaussen House.9
A-Frames
Vacation home purveyors and promoters sought designs that were contemporary and comfortable, bold yet acceptable to middle-class Americans. To many, the A-frame best matched this description. Because they were immediately recognizable, had both modern and traditional connotations, were affordable, easy to assemble and exceptionally versatile, the A-frame rose above the other modern vacation home forms to become the symbol of leisure living and the "good life."
Based upon the inherently strong equilateral truss, the roots of this structural form are undoubtedly prehistoric. As Time magazine stated, "The A-frame is not a new idea: the first man who leaned two poles together and threw a skin over them had a rudimentary version of it."10 Though evidence of its early history does not survive, there are numerous examples of the form being adopted for agricultural storage sheds, temporary hunting shacks and rudimentary peasant cottages in ancient Japan, medieval Europe and rural America.
The first A-frame designed strictly for leisure may have been Rudolph Schindler's house for Gisela Bennati, built above Lake Arrowhead, California in 1936. The design, which the architect passed off as "Norman-Style" to meet local building restrictions, was a reflection of his interests in geometric roof designs and their resulting interior spaces. In its shape, use of glazed walls, orientation toward the view, its plan and extensive use of plywood, the Bennati cabin was essentially a modest, postwar vacation home, built 20 years ahead of its time.
During the first years of the 1950s, several A-frame vacation homes were built by different architects with no acknowledged connection. Though all received some publicity, it was San Francisco designer John Campbell's version that captured the public's imagination and sparked excitement over the A-frame form. Designed in 1951 for Interiors magazine, the scheme, dubbed "Leisure House," was first built for exhibition at the San Francisco Arts Festival that same year.11 At the festival, visitors saw the design boiled down to a geometric purity, with pressed board roof/walls, a sleeping loft above a small kitchen and bathroom and a glass gable end opening onto a spacious deck, all crammed into 400 square feet. In 1952, Campbell built one for himself in Mill Valley, California. It served as a valuable promotion piece, winning awards and continuing to generate public interest. So many requests for information poured in that Campbell began to sell plans out of his office and arranged for a precut kit to be franchised and sold for less than $1,000.12
A-frame fervor faded mid-decade, but revived again when Geller's Hamptons version was constructed and a second variation included in the DFPA's 1958 plan book. An amateur builder and physician, Dr. David Hellyer of Tacoma, Washington, conceived the home, which had entrances and glazed areas cut into the side of the structure rather than on the gable end. DFPA promoters caught wind of Hellyer's plan early on, offered him free plywood in exchange for his design, photographed it as it went up and used it as a centerpiece of their vacation home promotional campaign. Within the first few months of publication, the plywood association had filled over 12,000 orders for complete working drawings of the A-frame. Over the next decade, it appeared in publications as varied as the Journal of Medical Economics and the AAA's American Tourist and was also featured at home and sportsmen shows from Seattle to Washington, D.C.
The popularity of Dr. Hellyer's design, and the A-frame in general, was attributable to a number of factors. Its structural simplicity made it easy and cheap to build by professional and amateur alike. It seemed equally appropriate on the beach or mountainside. It was readily adapted by extending the length or adding additional gables or dormers without compromising the intrinsic form. At a time when the emphasis was on low cost designs that also "stirred the imagination," A-frames delivered both.
Depending on who was looking at it, the A-frame was the embodiment of contemporary geometric inventiveness or a steadfast, timeless form that suggested the wilderness and rustic survival. This broad appeal also indicates why companies, even outside the building industry, appropriated the A-frame for their own ends. It had become a cultural phenomenon and symbol of leisure and style. As such, its image was used to sell everything from toys to frozen peas to other year-round houses.
Conclusion
By the late 1960s, the modest modern vacation home was an anachronism. Vacation homes had increased in size until there was little to distinguish them from permanent homes. The cost of recreation land had grown so high that it made little sense to build a $10,000 house on an $80,000 plot. The energy crisis of the early 1970s further curtailed demand for remotely located, uninsulated vacation homes, and condos and time-shares became a preferred alternative for those of more modest means.
Still the vitality and playfulness of the mid-century vacation home survived in some respects. Living rooms with vaulted ceilings, large glazed walls, and loft areas became common features of permanent homes in the 1970s. Even clearer is the crossover of A-frames into other architectural circles. At the height of its popularity, it was adapted for hundreds of new religious structures, including Eero Saarinen's Chapel at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana and the Protestant Chapel at Kennedy International Airport by Edgar A. Tafel. Roadside vernacular buildings from liquor stores and car washes to the Whataburger and Wienerschnitzel fast food chains also co-opted the A-frame shape to attract attention and lure customers.
Many postwar vacation homes exhibited a playfulness of form that came to define the style. But they were not whimsical for whimsy's sake. The best designs showed a creative expression while meeting the functional needs of 1950s and 60s leisure seekers. They offered flexible plans to accommodate varying numbers of visitors and a range of uses over the course of a day or weekend. They exhibited a harmony with nature and blurring of the distinction between interior and exterior through the creative use of glazing and natural, unfinished materials. They were inexpensive enough for over 300,000 families a year to buy or build during the trend's peak in the early 1960s. When all the requirements for a postwar vacation home were accommodated, the result was invariably different from the owner's permanent environment, whether it be boxy glass office or suburban ranch house. The result was a home that embodied the postwar culture of leisure and recreation.
Chad Randl is the author of a book titled A-Frame published recently by Princeton Architectural Press. The book explores the history of the plywood A-frame vacation cabin phenomenon in the 1960s.
FOOTNOTES
1 Douglas Fir Plywood Association, promotional package, 1958. Files of the author.
2 "Secrets of a Self Indulgent Summer: Vacation Shapes," Living for Young Homemakers, July 1961, 41.
3 This phenomenon was not unique to vacation homes. Mid-century gas stations, such as Phillips 66, used canted display windows and sweeping V-shaped canopies to attract attention and obscure the same square building forms that prevailed in earlier decades. See: Chester H. Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile. American Roadside Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), 111.
4 "Life Guide. Cabin Craft." Life, 31 May 1963, p. 17.
5 Leisure-Time Homes of Fir Plywood (Tacoma: Douglas Fir Plywood Association, 1958), 5.
6 Builder's Guide to the Second Home Market (Tacoma: Douglas Fir Plywood Association, 1964), 6.
7 From Kirk Wilkinson to George Matsumoto, 31 July 1960, in the George Matsumoto Papers and Drawings, MC# 42.3, Special Collections Department, North Carolina State University Libraries, Raleigh, North Carolina.
8 Builder's Guide to the Second Home Market (Tacoma: Douglas Fir Plywood Association, 1964), 5.
9 New Holiday Homes (Portland: Home Building Plan Service, 1965), 10.
10 "A is for Adaptable," Time, 8 December 1961, 56.
11 "Holidays in an Equilateral Triangle," Interiors, January 1951, 88. And "Campbell and Wong at the Festival," Interiors, January 1952, 10.
12 "The Leisure House" a press release on Campbell and Wong letterhead, dated 30 July 1954, Files of the author.
