Prefabrication experiments - 29 - The Ranger A-frame

Following World War II, politics, housing strategy, building techniques, and military technologies fused together to stimulate ambitious housing programs. While Europe concentrated on rebuilding, American domestic policies targeted spending on homes, consumer goods and leisure. The building industry boomed and applied principles of mass production to the balloon frame and tract housing. The building industry and its stakeholders used America’s government sponsored love affair with the home, leisure and purchasing capacity to consider other avenues for advancing and marketing its production.

An example of this industry-supported model was a pattern book of country houses promoted by the Douglas Fir Plywood Association (DFPA). The family cottage, lake house or second home was advocated as an affordable way to strengthen family values and escape to the wilderness. Although the catalogue of designs was not really a prefabrication experiment, it illustrated an important paradigm shift in the relationship between industrialisation and architecture. The architect was a marketing tool for promoting the use of a particular material.

All the designs encouraged self-build, a 32 square foot module (4’x8’ sheets) and the use of plywood in envelope, structure, furnishings and interior partitions. Architects were commissioned by the DFPA in a manufacturer’s association driven process. Most designs adapted an American modernist aesthetic to a regional and woodland idyllic setting.

The Ranger A-Frame designed by Nagel and Associates (design no. 15) demonstrated the regionalist adaptation of modernist axioms (kit building, material truth, structural expression, modular coordination). The simple A-frame was composed of 2”x12” beams anchored to a concrete pier foundation. The interior and exterior plywood panels dictated the spans and overall dimensions. The timber A-frame was nothing new. Its simple triangle arch structure is an age-old building system. The A-frame uses triangulation as its fundamental strategy, which makes it strong and easily assembled. A variation of the simple triangle arch, the Ranger A-frame used a horizontal tension tie beam as a floor structure and for lateral bracing. The exterior A-frames supported a textile sunshade for exterior living, another modernist feature. 

The Ranger A-Frame, and the DFPA pattern book exemplify the leisure zeitgeist that accompanied post-war living. If modernism illustrated architect driven experimentation, the latter half of the twentieth century exposed this type of consumer-minded exploration. 

Rendering from the Douglas Fir Plywood Association catalogue of designs