Structure of website columns and navigation
Don't worry about wrapping your content too much if the style cannot be achieved without it. If it can, the extra wrap may be overkill.
Your markup relies a lot on the &lt;article&gt; where it may not be necessary. For instance, you put one &lt;article&gt; tag into another, which is odd. You also put and &lt;article&gt; tag into the &lt;header&gt;, which is also odd.


If you want simple containers, I would recommend you stick with &lt;div&gt;s with semantic class attributes. They have been around for a while and used for wrapping other tags. They are the tried and true method and their lack of semantic meaning will not confuse the reader or crawler.