Transfer and Transformation: Framing Timber without Rails in the Siegen Industrial Region and beyond from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract The Siegen industrial region, an area with around a fifteen kilometre radius centred on the eponymous city in northwestern Germany, is renowned for its timber frame houses, dating from the late middle ages to the early-twentieth century. Among these, the houses that were constructed between 1870 and 1920 are noteworthy for their thin timber posts and the omission of short horizontal bars between the posts, known as rails. Starting in the 1960s, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed roughly three hundred of these houses and, in a publication dating from 1977, selected and arranged them to create a kind of imagined, virtual place. Until now, these houses have received little theoretical or architectural historical interest concerning their origin and the importance of their construction. The new research presented in this article provides insight into their development and meaning, revealing how external forces of modernization interacted with local building traditions to produce a notable regional architecture at the onset of the twentieth century.