Big Roof, Little Roof

Abstract

Towards the end of the 19th century, American architecture came into its own. The houses of the briefly ascendent Shingle Style took full and unapologetic advantage of the Gilded Age’s gaudy romanticism. Shingles wrapped uninterrupted around interwoven gables and complexly curved surfaces. Dormers seamlessly devolved from roof planes, and covered porches emphasized horizontality amidst the proliferation of building wings. Conic rooflets, spiraling towers, bending walls, and other architectural anomalies were all contained within the vacuum-shrunk uniformity of the shingled aggregate. In the words of Vincent Scully, the genre’s pre-eminent scholar, the houses of the Shingle Style comprised “the freest and, on the whole, among the most generous forms that the United States has yet produced. In their own way they were also the gentlest forms: the most relaxed and spiritually open.”