Why Do We Say Balloon Framing
If you ask a group of 10 carpenters how to build something, you’ll get 14 opinions. It’s not that there aren’t objectively right or wrong answers—a house must stand up straight and have walls, a floor, and a roof—but there are many ways to get there. When it comes to wood-built homes, however, we have a pretty clear Where-Why-How trajectory, and most of those ways make sense in their relative time and place.
There are two main ways to frame houses out of wood. The first style of wood homes is called post-and-beam, or timber-framed. It relies on the art of using strategic cuts in the wood to join everything together. If you’ve ever played with Lincoln Logs, you’ve already explored the concept of timber-framing. Whether in the rustic cabins of Norway or the elegant shoin zukuri buildings of Japan, timber-framing relies on two things: lush forests; and skilled carpenters.
The other way of framing a wood home is called stick-framing, and the name speaks for itself. It is a building method that, by using smaller wood “sticks” like 2x4s, specifically accounts for a *lack* of lush forests and skilled carpenters. Such was the case in a small French-dominated settlement in Missouri in the early 1830s. While it’s probable that this particular method of stick-framing was already being used in the bleak and willowy Plains, it was the French settlers who dubbed the new method maison en boulin. Maison en boulin translates to “scaffolding house”, with boulins being specifically the horizontal planks that connect to the vertical members.
A maison en boulin (“may-zon on boo-lan”) is a descriptive term, since the bones of the house mimic scaffolding. An entire home can be constructed with a very small crew of semi-experienced semi-carpenters, using softwood lumber that could be quickly milled and easily transported, and pounded together with the newest innovation in construction technology: machine-made nails. This meant that homes could go up quickly, cheaply, and with minimal labor. Structurally, it is best envisioned as being like a bookshelf, or even just exactly like scaffolding, with long pieces of wood making up the sides and the “shelves” (floors) attached to the inside. In building terms, a maison en boulin is a stick-framed structure with continuous vertical members running from the bottom plate all the way to the uppermost top plate, with floor joists attached to a ledger or ribbon board that has been let-in or face-nailed to the interior of the studs.
This is called Balloon Framing.
Like so many words, especially in English, we embraced a mis-heard term and ran with it. By the time the city of Chicago adopted Balloon Framing as its principle means of new-and-quick housing construction for its--*ahem*--BALLOONING population in 1834, this particular style of framing had already been misnomered “Balloon Framing” by both the public and by city officials. The name was made into a running joke that the framework looked so light that it could float away like a balloon, or be popped as easily as one.
Sadly, and ironically, Balloon Framing did in fact turn out to be as fragile as its mis-spoken nomenclature. Because you could stand in the attic and drop a coin along the wall down to the basement, people soon realized that fire could travel up the same pathway. The Great Fire of Chicago, in which Balloon Framing (and touching eaves) led to the near-total destruction of the city, innovated stick-framing to become what it is today: western platform framing. Instead of homes being built like a bookshelf, homes became built more like a house of cards, with each floor separated by a floor system, and walls built from the 8’ studs that we all try to shove into the back of our sedans today.
So that’s why we say Balloon Framing.
