Shingle Style

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AKA: Contemporary Shingle Style

Location: Dewey Beach, Delaware

Additional Information: On September 18th 1873 the headline “Financial Crash: Money World Shaken From Center To Circumference” heralded the onset of America's worst financial crisis to date. In the coming weeks thousands of banks and businesses would close and by the end of that year a quarter of New York City’s population would be out of work.

7 years later on December 6th 1880 President Rutherford B. Hayes began his state of the union address like this: “I congratulate you” he said “on the continued and increasing prosperity of our country. By the favor of Divine Providence we have been blessed during the past year with health, with abundant harvests, with profitable employment for all our people, and with contentment at home, and with peace and friendship with other nations.”

America was back on her feet.

It was about this time that the Shingle style of building emerged in the Boston area. Over the next twenty years it would absorb elements of several major American architectural styles and would, in my opinion, break so completely with convention of the day that it would need to be reined back in around the turn of the century. I see in the shingle style a real devil may care attitude which befits a nation coming back from the brink. What an incredible thing it must have been to build them; to see those organically inspired lines taking form in a wave of shingles washing over an eyebrow dormer. The Shingle Style was also famous for wide porches, towers, Pallidin windows, Romanesque arches, rusticated stone foundations, flared eaves and of course shingles for as far as the eye could see.

The example we have is of a contemporary building in the shingle style. I was lucky enough to venture down its street in Dewey Beach, Delaware with my camera. I knew it was something special and was not surprised that an internet search returned our relative link.

Relative Link: Shingle Style

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