Participation Points

Barn raising has long served as a cultural shorthand invoked to extol virtues of mutual aid and premodern communitarianism, a symbolic reference for an event where neighbors come together to build together.1   But instead of an origin story of American pastoralism or a romanticized view of country life, barn raising is more instructive as a collective construction practice that challenges notions of property and innovation, relying on systems of exchange built on favors and community over individualism and profit. In making visible the precarious economies of participation, raisings provide a frame for contending with the homogenizing forces of capitalism and abstraction. They depend on reciprocal practices that turn engagement into instruction. Ohio barn preservationist Thomas O’Grady offers a small lesson in reciprocity, reminding us that “a barn is also a menagerie of sorts… It’s an entire ecosystem of insects and the things that are after them. If you watched it close enough you could see a certain balance being maintained over a period of time.”2   

Historic barn raisings relied on tight-knit, often exclusionary self-determined communities and were overwhelmingly patriarchal, heteronormative spaces. The spectacle of community in action was limited to those whose presence affirmed a narrow ideal of who belonged in public. Men built, women cooked, children watched. To participate was to perform one’s role in the community, and those attending were always counted. “Over 100 assisted” at a raising for “progressive farmer” Charlie Stout,3 “one hundred and thirty persons took dinner at Mr. Eckles’s,”4 while a smaller crew of thirty-six raised a frame in Rockford, Illinois.5 Headcounts functioned as a measure of social currency, proof of community standing, and were a regular appearance in nineteenth-century newspaper articles and county agricultural columns. Accidents were just as common as the raisings themselves: “a heavy bent fell in a heap, killing one man instantly and fatally injuring four others.”6 Another collapse “killed seven men on the spot,”7 and then Amos Herr “got his head between some heavy timber, which so squeezed it that blood oozed from his nose and ears. He was conveyed home,” yet was said to be recovering.8 Despite the constancy of these stories (some of which were likely hyperbole), neighbors still showed up, because absence counted too. 

Meals were equally structural, expected, and scrutinized: “The feast prepared upon these occasions, is regarded as the substantial feature of the day's program.”9 At one raising, a baker brought “100 loaves of bread and 400 rusks to feed the many that were expected,”10 while another account describes the social penalty for a man who drank all the buttermilk and then left abruptly before the work was done.11 Raisings also doubled as political forums where, for instance, it was common “to take the vote of the company for President… Van Buren 34, Harrison 2.”12 While collapsing the space between collective labor and civic ritual, these accounts include a remarkable amount of technical detail for a general audience. One, for example, describes how 

while standing upon an upper beam endeavoring to fit the purlin plate to its place, the post intended to support this plate slipped from its fastening and fell against Mr. Cook, bearing him down onto the beam. While in this position with the weight of a heavy post upon him, the purlin plate loosened and slipped its entire length-some 60 feet-crosswise of the post, pulling both man and timber to the ground, making a fall of about 18 feet.13  

Mortises, tenons, plates, and bents appeared in print without explanation, but with the same fluency as elections and markets, suggesting a common knowledge important enough in everyday life that a reader would be erudite in the language of construction. Today, architecture has given up on that kind of public literacy. Taken together, the accounts reveal a shared practice structured as much by expectation and obligation, as by risk and recognition. Raisings, in this sense, reveal the dependencies and asymmetries that exist in all forms of collective work. And for this reason, they are sites to redesign the social infrastructure of the built environment.    

While participation was highly visible in nineteenth-century raisings, today it’s diffused into economies of labor, material, infrastructure, and globalization. In practice it’s fundamental to building, but architecture has rarely positioned participation as such: from people at oil fields fueling petrochemical plants to millworkers sawing timber, long-haul truckers moving rebar, masons laying brick, carpenters framing walls, factory workers pressing tiles, electricians, plumbers, roofers, tile setters, drywall crews, finish carpenters, sales reps, inspectors, sanitation workers, and maintenance crews—all play a part. Architecture is dependent on bodies whose contributions are rarely counted and routinely anonymized. But naming participation can just as easily consolidate recognition as distribute it. And diffusing attribution often does more to obscure than democratize.

Architecture has long been characterized by models of production that divide the discipline—which is often linked to intellectual forms of labor and management—from the practice of building. This has not only worked to segregate forms of labor along gendered, class-based, and racialized lines, but has also diminished scholarly attention to the social, political, and technical aspects of construction as worthy of architectural research. Barn raising straddles this managed divide: one that has absolved architects from material consequences, and severed architecture from the multitude of people, activities, and geographies that contribute to a building before, during, and after construction and that architecture is dependent on. Reclaiming the construction site as a space of participation offers a way to conceive of architecture around its material and social substrates. But this requires more than inviting people to pick up hammers. It proposes a reckoning with the systems that determine who gets to participate, under what conditions, and with what recognition. 

From Object to Action  

Mid-twentieth-century ideas of participation in the United States converged against a postwar backdrop that emphasized collective action as a way to reshape public life away from the kinds of passive spectatorship and consumption promoted by new forms of media in suburban family homes. At the same time, democratic politics pushed participation as both a promise and a contested right. In architecture, participatory models were both prevalent and diverse in their forms of collaboration and coproduction: from design-build studios by figures like Charles Moore at Yale and Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s scoring workshops to Ant Farm’s DIY inflatable projects to Nicholas Negroponte’s experiments with cybernetics at MIT.14 At the same time, artistic production turned from objects to actions, turning the audience into participants.15  

It was both from within and contributing to this broader cultural shift that the artist Allan Kaprow began to develop a series of participatory performances in the late 1950s. In sites as varied as gymnasiums, lofts, storefronts, farms, and city streets, these performances, which would later be conceived of as “happenings,” were comprised of sets of instructions that foregrounded action over the finished object.16 Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) partitioned the performance space into three rooms and unfolded through a series of discrete, mundane actions written on index cards—like folding a sheet of paper, painting lines, squeezing oranges, sweeping the floor, or shifting between spaces—that “collaborators” would enact upon the chime of a bell. These sequences of practicable actions, inscriptions, and cues were outlined so that many could follow, and included oral instructions and slide presentations.17 As fundamental acts of education, they turned the space of performance into a classroom. 

Kaprow’s happenings continued to resemble pedagogical environments. In a 1968 interview with Dorothy Seckler, he proposed the application of happenings to “the learning of a number of disciplines formerly taught in the classroom from books… [What] better way to learn about civics, for instance? Or sociology? Or popular imagery in our landscape?”18 Barn raising can also be understood as an epistemological object and a way to reconceive the construction site as a distributed curriculum for learning in the field, a pedagogy diffused into material and activity, teaching people how to pay attention, how to enter open situations, how to inhabit contingency, accept uncertainty, and attend to other people. If happenings had a pedagogical ambition, it was to redesign learning around acts of participation. Barn raising, in this sense, can be understood as the first happening in the US.

Left: Marriage marks on a timber frame captured in the film Barn Raisers (2017), directed by Kelly Rundle and Tammy Rundle. Center: An image of the scribe rule timber framing technique where vertical transfer lines are being dropped and traced from one member to another, shown on the cover of the magazine Mortise & Tenon 16 (March 2024). Right: An image of log scribing using a veritas transfer scribe, published in Timber Framing 78 (December 2005).

Lessons in Raising

Participation in a raising relies on a legible, relatively obvious system of marks and sequences understood well enough to be taken up by whoever shows up. Until the early nineteenth century, “scribe rule” construction was the dominant method of timber framing for barn building in North America. It depended on full-scale layout directly with material rather than drawn and scaled measurements. Hand cut timber was the most common building material at the time, but was wildly irregular in its dimension. In planning and laying out a barn, all of this material variation and irregularity was accounted for by mapping and scribing each piece of wood onto every other to ensure a tight fit. Adjoining pieces were labeled with Roman numerals and other marks that instructed a range of activities on site, like how to pair members and where to align joints, as well as traces of the people and labor involved in assembly. These inscriptions recorded and coordinated collective action in ways that exceed architectural drawings, which are intentionally limited, detached, and denaturing.

The square rule method, illustrating the overarching idea that hidden within each hewn timber there is a perfect piece of wood with square corners. Often snap lines or a framing square were used to locate the intersecting faces of the “ideal” piece. Drawing by Jack Sobon, published in Timber Framing 31 (March 1994): 9.

Unlike “square rule” construction—which as the name suggests squared up the irregular edges of wood and cut connecting ends down to universal dimensions, anticipating milled lumber and the anonymizing industrial processes of architectural modernity that abstracts the world into units—scribe rule accommodated the inimitability of material and the varying levels of know-how and bodies on site.19 The marks made in and on the surface of material are known as “marriage marks.” At a barn raising, they function not only as practical guides but as pedagogical tools, making the logic of construction legible and knowable, permitting the participation of a wide range of people, from experienced framers to new neighbors. Marriage marks also extend the lessons of raising beyond the building site. They not only enable whole frames to be assembled, but also disassembled, moved, and reassembled across landscapes. Marriage marks are a form of embodied information that captures people and work that occur before construction, and are a way to understand a building as a system of dependent—yet shared and legible—relations. 

At a barn raising, instruction is transmitted as much through inscription as through observation and action. Participants likely begin by watching from the periphery, then might move to measure the amount of drift across a row of pike poles, or check the line of a plumb bob. Demonstrations of bodily movement are repeated until they can be enacted reliably, while the pace of work is maintained through collective cues. “Through the din and laughter in the kitchen, concocting of lemonade, and the clatter of plates, Elvira Hillard could hear the steady Ye-ho! Ye-ho! of the men as they raised one side of the frame after another, and adjusted stud, and sleeper, and beam in its place.”20 If, according to John Dewey, education is experiential and transpires in the act of doing, then the raising site offers an ideally precarious situation for constant adjustment as material moves, wind changes speed and direction, people need breaks, someone gets injured, another calls for a stop.21 A raising is a pedagogical environment where experience is continually transformed into knowledge, and instruction is less about the direct transfer of information than the collective development of practices and understandings.

Not all positions at a raising are subject to the same risks, perceive the same possibilities, or come to know the same things. Builders stand at the plates and scaffolds, cooks move between the field and the table, and from the sidelines children’s observational learning is situational. In this way there are a multitude of what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges” at a raising, where what we know is only ever partial and always conditioned by our own specific position.22 This is instructive of the limited and incomplete view that everyone has, and acknowledges a dependency on others to complete the picture or raise a barn. It also provides a useful frame for thinking about participation less in terms of consensus, and more in terms of a constellation—holding difference without collapsing it.

What might count as “knowing” at a raising is produced through conditions that are increasingly variable and dependent: on wood, on weather, on women, and on many worlds beyond the raising of the frame. The entirety of a raising is an instructional environment, from learning about reciprocity through the favor bank of showing up today because you’ll need someone tomorrow, to an education in limits, where being a good participant might mean refusal, or being a bad participant might be just as instructive. The question has never been whether or not one participates, but under what conditions and to whose benefit. Indeed, hospitality is always an essential infrastructure for participation. At raisings, meals were prepared in abundance, water was circulated, benches were placed in the shade, and children were tended to on site. Appearing in public and participating is never a given, but is only ever made possible by the infrastructures that enable bodies to be seen, heard, and to perform. These infrastructural conditions of assembly are made up of material supports that either allow or inhibit pedagogical environments, and ultimately determine who can learn, how, and in what context.23  

Today, conversations about education run along political lines. Expertise is being classified as elitism or used for partisan agendas, knowledge is commodified and stratified, and participation is performed under increasing conditions of risk. Pedagogy is a mechanism that structures who gets to know and what counts as knowing. While barn raisings naturalized these asymmetries and used social obligation to fabricate an image of community, happenings worked to refuse that kind of apparent naturalness and turn the project itself into the line between inclusion and exclusion. Both remind us that participation is never neutral and is always instructive of the systems that stage collective life. For processes designed around participation, the question is less how to invite and more how to understand and intervene in the terms already in place. Who benefits from the invitation? What happens when someone refuses? Did they even have a choice? In this sense, raisings are a model for examining the entirety of building as a relational practice, and the ways architectural work is embedded in, dependent on, and facilitated by structures of the economy, family, labor, and risk. To reckon with the terms of participation might be to risk architecture itself. But what comes next may do more to teach us what kind of architecture is actually worth pursuing today.