A-frame
Chad Randl

"A" was the architectural letterform of leisure building in postwar America. Eager to stake out mountain and lakeside retreats, an entire generation of high-end homebuilders and weekend handymen found the A-frame an easy and affordable home to construct; its steeply sloping triangular roof distinctive and easy to maintain (almost no exterior walls to paint!). Fueled by A-frame plans and kits, the style became something of a national craze, with tens of thousands of houses built.

Indeed, the A-frame was an icon for recreation, an acceptable form of modernism (although its origins go back thousands of years), and a convenient tool for marketing a wide range of products, including gas-powered toilets, motorcycles, and canned vegetables; Fisher-Price even made one for children. So popular on the domestic front, the A-Frame was eventually adapted to other building types, from roadside restaurants to churches.

In a fascinating look at this architectural phenomenon, Chad Randl tells the story of the "triangle" house from prehistoric Japan to its lifestyle-changing heyday in the 1960s. Part architectural history and part cultural exploration, , A-Frame documents every aspect of A-frame living using cartoons, ads, high-style and do-it-yourself examples, family snapshots, and even an appendix with a complete set of blueprints in case you want to build your own!


Chad Randl is an architectural historian working at the National Park Service. He resides in Takoma Park, Maryland.
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Editorial Reviews

The A-Frame - ski town icon, Real Estate Times:
"During the 60s, A-frames became so popular thats tens of thousands of houses were built. A great place to turn for more information is the intruguing book A-frame by Chad Randl published by Princeton Architecural Press. This book explains how the A-frame has its roots in ancient Japan and how the A-frame became very popular as an ideal style for a vacation home, especially in mountains and ski towns." (November, 2007)

Array Magazine:
"Randl has assembled a fun, informative homage to the A-frame." (8/2004)

ReadyMade:
"A-Frame does a bang-up job bringing together the houses, restaurants, churches, and ski lodges that helped sound the era's construction boom." (5/2004)

Damn:
"A-frame is a well-researched and affectionate tale of a structure that came to embody the post-war prosperity of the USA, and as Randl neatly puts it 'was the right shape at the right time.' A perfectly flawed combination of the idiosyncratic and the familiar. " (Oct/Nov 2006)

Metropolis:
"Randl's thorough and well-illustrated history begins with antecedents such as primitive huts and Swedish saddle-roof houses, and includes architect-designed examples like John Campbell's much published 1953 Leisure House, in Mill Valley, California." (3/2005)

House & Garden:
"This scholarly and eminently readable history by Chad Randl illuminates the architectural emblem of midcentury affluence in America, the affordable building that every class could embrace for a second (or first) home. Bonus: the book has blueprints." (8/2004)

The Financial Times, The Independent :
"Aw, shucks, isn't this the cutest book cover you've ever seen? Back in the 1950s, A-frame vacation houses were all the rage for newly prosperousAmericans. Easy to assemble and cheap (that whole two walls for a roof thing really worked on the budget front) they were pretty to boot (if only they'd stayed in fashion we could have had fields covered in these instead of ugly trailer homes). And hard as nails - one house featured in Chad Randl's fascinating new book A-frame (Princeton Architectural Press, pounds 15.99) was still standing after a volcanic eruption, albeit under four feet of mud and dust." (6/19/2004)

City Magazine:
"If you think the design is spiffy snd swell, and you find yourself with a lakeside acre and a vintage sweater vest, A-frame comes with a complete set of blueprints. It's like the advertisements say, 'You can't go wrong!'" (Spring/Summer 2004)

Athens Banner-Herald:
"A brilliant little book. Packed with amazing photos and illustrations, this stylishly designed hard cover tells the A-Frame's architectural tale from its roots in prehistoric Japan and 19th century Sweden to it 1960s heyday." (September 15, 2005)

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