The American West hosts an abundance of Shingle Style homes and buildings.
Shingle Style could be considered most appropriate for single-family
homes, and nearly all traditional towns in the United States are lined with
attractive shingled houses with features including gables, dormers and porches.
Yet in San Francisco I often see urban buildings with brown shingles on the
exterior. I’ve always found these different, casual and woodsy; a contrast
to the brownstone buildings in New York and masonry beaux-arts buildings in global cities. Another reason to love San Francisco.
 One of many gorgeous homes in Spokane, Washington.
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 A Shingle Style corner buildingin San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood |
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Vincent Scully sparked my interest in the Shingle Style when I had him as a Professor of Architectural History at University of Miami in the late 90’s; and my admiration of this traditional American style of wood-frame buildings has been part of my lens toward towns and cities ever since.
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A couple of Summers ago we stayed at the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone. My fave. It's a crazy, shingle-style, knotty-pine log-cabin tour de force. Spectacular.
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Upon returning home to the Bay Area, I continued my 10-year housing search, and witnessed some fine and not-so-fine architecture.
THE DREADED HOUSING SEARCH.
There's nowhere to live in California. Hyperbole, you say?
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Is this architecture or not? A philosophical question. |
Consider this: a townhouse development in Corte Madera, CA where the buildings are devoid of architectural significance and lack articulation altogether. Look at the monolithic shingled wall. Sad. Can this even qualify as architecture? (The correct answer is NO.) California is filled with edge cities like these - single land use developments plopped down next to highways. Very sad. |
Oh California!
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Glad to have had the opportunity to grow my architectural knowledge and increase my collection of academic images. But GRATEFUL that I returned to my urban values and remembered the value of REAL TOWNS & CITIES. San Francisco is a great place to live. Real towns & cities are built for humans.Shingle style lives on in the best of them. |
A mixed-use building in Eugene, Oregon. |
© Amber Ortiz 2023