Four years ago, the Pritzker Prize–winner Tadao Ando spectacularly converted a 1920s apartment building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago into exhibition spaces for a gallery named Wrightwood 659. The gallery is currently staging a resourceful exhibition on wood-frame construction, the method by which more than 90% of U.S. houses are built.  Rarely has wood-framing been the subject of an architectural show. It’s too mundane a topic—or at least it seemed that way until two associate professors at the University of Illinois Chicago, Paul Andersen and Paul Preissner, conceived the American Framing exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. One year after Venice, the much talked-about exhibition makes its American debut at Wrightwood 659. The show’s dominant feature is a soaring three-story assembly of wood-framing that fills the gallery’s atrium. Visitors walking through it get a sense of the vivid effects that are achievable with ordinary wood studs.