We’re obsessed with this article from Architectural Digest by Kyle Hoepner, as it beautifully explores architect’s creative and practical obsession with shingles and shakes (“their brawnier, split cousins”).
Memorable quotes from the article:
It may be that newly arrived colonists were influenced by the practices of local Indigenous peoples such as the Wampanoag in Massachusetts, whose winter dwellings were constructed using overlapping sheets of bark. But the proliferation of wood shingles may also have been an adaptation of old-world models to a new context: “Shingles have been a common roof solution for a long, long time,” says John Ike, a partner at the AD PRO Directory–listed architectural firm Ike Baker Velten in Oakland, California. “And in America wood was the most plentiful, readily accessible material.”
With so much going for them, how can anyone not be a shingle fan? This humble slice of wood is “ingrained in the American mind as something that says ‘home,’” Kligerman (principal of Kligerman Architecture & Design) concludes, while at the same time “it has enormous flexibility. And because shingles are so lightweight, you can do all kinds of design gymnastics if you want.”
The article posits five reasons why shingles and shakes are still popular with architects, builders and homeowners.
Below are a few stunning examples:
