Illustrated Architecture Dictionary .................. Styles of Architecture
Shingle Style in Buffalo, New York
1880-1900
TEXT Beneath Illustrations
|
|
|
|
 |
|
Richardson's Sherman House |
Richardson's Stoughton House. |
420 Linwood Ave. |
420 Linwood Ave. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
412 Linwood Ave. |
412 Linwood Ave. |
Carlton Sprague Summer House |
63 Irving Place |
|
|
|
|
|
|
42 Ashland Ave. |
42 Ashland Ave. |
46 Ashland Ave. |
Atwater House |
Other buildings:
HistoryThe term "shingle style" was popularized by Vincent Scully in the 1950s. It is sometimes referred to as the "seaside style." The shingle style is basically the Queen Anne style wrapped in shingles.
The Shingle Style had its genesis in the Boston area in the early 1880s. Over the next two decades it spread across the country, although it was favored for the rambling seaside estates and resorts of the New England coast. Like the Queen Anne style, the Shingle style was influenced initially by the work of the architect Richard Norman Shaw, but replacing his tile-hanging (PHOTO) by shingle-hanging.
Henry Hobson Richardson (1836-86) is credited with developing the style and used it for most of his country and suburban houses, as did many prominent architects. The pioneer building is the Sherman House at Newport, Rhode Island, by Henry Hobson Richardson (1874). McKim, Mead and White also participated. The masterpiece is Richardson's Stoughton House at Cambridge, Massachusetts (1882-3).
In masonry buildings, the style was known as Richardson Romanesque
Shingle style borrows wide porches, its shingled surfaces, and asymmetrical forms from Queen Anne style, but practitioners opened up the interior space and made a lot fewer rooms; the rooms were a lot bigger, it was easier for light to penetrate the interior.
This architectural style is considered a Victorian era style because, like the British Victorians, reaction to the Industrial Revolution led to reexamination of the pre-Industrial Revolution past. A revival of Gothic style architecture was the first manifestation of this romantic portrayal of the past.
Features
- Two or three stories tall
- Spreads low against the ground on a heavy stone foundation
- Qualities of weight, density, and permanence are pronounced
- Masonry is dark and roughhewn
- Asymmetrical forms
- Shingles were available in many colors, such as the Indian reds, olive greens and deep yellows, which were popular at the time
- Shingles form a continuous covering, stretched smooth over roof lines and around corners in a kind of contoured envelope
- Rounded contours sheltered by a broad and overhanging roof. The sweep of the roof may continue to the first floor level providing cover for porches, or is steeply pitched and multi-planed.
- Entries are defined by heavy (often low) arches; columns are short and stubby
- Wide porches
- The eaves of the roof are close to the walls so as not to distract from the homogeneous and monochromatic shingle covering
- Broad gables
- Casement and sash windows are generally small, may have many lights, and often are grouped into twos or threes
- The curving "eyebrow" dormer is distinctive
- Interior: free-flowing plan
- Interior: large rooms and porches loosely arranged around an open "great hall," dominated by a grand staircase.
- Interior: staircases
Sources:
- Rachel Carley's "The Visual Dictionary of American Domestic Architecture," 1997
- from John J.-G. Blumenson's "Identifying American Architecture"
- - from "The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture," 1991
- "A Field Guide to American Architecture," by Carole Rifkind, 1980
- A Graycliff-sponsored tour of Four Silsbee Houses" in October 2000. Tour guide: Architectural historian John Conlin.
