A History Lesson

I'm back again... Stu that is, although I can here David Gilmore asking if anybody is out there. No matter, I'll just keep rambling on.

The demo over the weekend peaked my interest. The house is so odd in many ways. There's wood on virtually every surface (floor, walls, ceiling). There are five bedrooms, all the same size and that size being small. Some oddly place rooms and some oddly placed walls. And that's ignoring for a second the lack of a basement, the cabin-like appearance, etc.

I was particularly intrigued that while taking down the wood paneling over the weekend that the interior walls had been built after the wood floor had been laid. But, the wood paneling had been put on the exterior walls before the wood floor had been laid. So, kind of an odd sequence....
1. Shell of a house (stud walls, ceiling joists, floor boards)
2. Wood Paneling on exterior walls
3. Wood floor and wood ceiling.
4. Interior stud walls
5. Interior wood paneling on those walls

Well, I decided to do some searching online. I new the address and sort of knew the former owners last name, along with the fact they were in the lumber business. After some false starts, I finally hit gold. I got a search result for a recently published book about St Paul architecture. The only pages the preview would show me where the notes, but it was enough to further my search.

Continuing to nerd out on this, I found the book at B&N. Much to my chagrin, not only was the house mentioned in the book, but there's a picture of it with a brief write up on it's architectural importance. Whaa?! The house that we can hardly find anything worthwhile about is architecturally important?! Well, as is turns out and as you can read here, it's one of the few Modern houses from the early '50s in St Paul. And there was a reasoning behind how this thing was built. Apparently, the reason for the interior walls being built after the floor and ceiling were put in was so they had the option of moving those falls should they need to. I guess this was a sort of compromise to get a mortgage on a house style (Modern) that banks typically didn't like to loan out on. Innovative? Sure. But, that's about as far as I'll go with it.

Now, that said, there's a couple of old magazine articles from the early 50's that apparently talk about the innovative building technique of the house in more depth. So if anyone has a copy of issue 84 of Mississippi Valley Lumberman from Nov '52 or Issue 17 of Northwest Architect from Jan 53, let me know!

It'll be interesting to see what the rest of demo reveals, although it already appears that beyond techniques or style, the house is pretty simply and won't have too many surprises. Fingers crossed.