A house is not a home, but home is a house. Shingle House affronts the challenge of resonating with, yet deviating from the typical American shingle-style house, an image so synonymous with home, it cannot escape our memory. We are fascinated by the innocent pitched roof sheds that litter the American countryside and suburbia. They are iconic in their multiplicity, banal in their singularity, tranquility replicated ad nauseum.

This then becomes a game in which we can only question what has already been perfected.  In confronting the image we look to its parts. We find beautiful the individual elements and their complex relationship to the whole; the shingles as ornament, gutters as cornice, gables as pediments, and shuttered apertures as ordered composition. Yet for all of these, it is a typology recognizable simply in the naive image of its silhouette.

In this project, rather than attempt the impractical, to make these elements new, somehow negating their importance, we try to reconcile the whole through an architecture that blends its discrete parts. A monolithic expression of material begins to dematerialize the entire composition. Its image becomes as childlike as that silhouette. The parts become plastic, open for interpretation. The roof’s overhanging canopy, when combined with the plinth, becomes an abstraction of traditional suburban porches.  Upon approach, this canopy and shingled entablature obscures the view of the curved pitch above, recalling the modernist flat roofs of mid-century American housing, yet once inside, the curved pitch reemerges. Windows are oversized, transformed into doors, bleeding out to this porch. The house is confronted with its own image in its evocation of a familiar memory, a state of transformation that recalls, but questions the type.

In transforming this icon, we are not suggesting novelty. Rather, we challenge the assumption that novelty ever existed in the first place, as this house existed in the Primitive Hut, man’s first discovery of Architecture. We embrace the copy and rejoice in its familiarity. We suspect this is what draws us so close; a refreshing rebirth of an age-old image.