wood shingles firmness,commodity and delight
pattern research testing surface
lisa rapoport
For a little while now, we have been playing with wood shingles and shakes. These are old materials that are still in use, a renewable resource, easily available, you might even say boring. We think these perfectly embody Vitruvius’ three- century old triad of qualities for good architecture – Firmness, Commodity and Delight. What could you possibly do with them that is new? Shingles are cut and installed in pretty much the same way as they were 150 or more years ago. These projects have not embraced a new material but instead have challenged us to rethink how to make an old and reliable material seem new.
When we started our practice in the 90s, we worked on tiny projects with shoe-string budgets. We needed tried and true materials, dumb and forgiving detailing that could be built by a wide variety of not-always-the-best contractors and even sometimes by our clients on weekends. Though (some) of our budgets have increased over the years, we have still predominantly used natural wood cladding (typically linear) for our residential work, and often for our commercial and institutional work. Meanwhile, there has been a plethora of new cladding materials – but many have minimum orders, need licensed installers, etc. Is wood the most interesting cladding? Nope. But what we have found, is that it still can be surprising and delightful.
About eight years ago we started working on a tiny ground floor addition to an unassuming typical tiny working- class Toronto house. The ground floor was brick, and the upper floor was tucked into a dormer on a long, sloped roof. The dormer was clad in shakes with a simple trident pattern worked into the regular shakes, tying it into its attached neighbour. Our residential renovations of late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses have always tried to find a single aspect of the existing house that could work in a fruitful dialogue with new contemporary work. Here, we decided to create feature shingle panels adjacent to the door and window around the side. Rather than bringing in a third material, we decided to explore ways of making an existing material seem new. We looked at standard shapes from the off the shelf menu – fish scale, round, diamond reverse fish scale, dart or diamond, left chisel, right chisel, arrow, hexagonal, inverted dart, square – shapes that have been around for well over 100 years. Take a deep dive into the Shingle Style buildings of the late nineteenth century up the Atlantic seaboard, or if you live in Toronto, a short walk through the Annex. Although several shapes were often used on the same façade or object, they would be used in sequence – like six rows of darts alternating with six rows of fish scales, or dormers or bay windows each picked out
all images this page: Steven Evans
32 on site review 48 :: building materials
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