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Shingles Club
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Photo Courtesy of Jim McNeil This tower sports rare acorn shingles with small spacers.
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Jim McNeil was contemplating shingles while still in his teens, helping his father with his roofing company in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in the 1960s. Along the line he began to notice the artistic use of shingles on exterior walls. The houses weren't always in the best of condition, but myriad shapes and colors of shingles and the patterns of their installations-an effect called imbrication-convinced him that this was a dying art form that should be recorded.
In 1986 he married technology to 11 years of photographs of shingled buildings both beautiful and decrepit, using a computer to draw repeating patterns of the 10 or so basic shingle shapes in varied combinations. Over the next two decades he found other artisans who employ shingles in the gables, mansard walls, and dormers of houses or as purely decorative interior designs. (They were especially popular in the churches of Canada's maritime provinces.)
To preserve this art and encourage architects, builders, and homeowners to consider it, he developed a CD, Before the Tin Man (a not-so-veiled reference to aluminum siding) that includes more than 800 photographs of decorative shingling, as well as hundreds of line drawings suggesting different ways to install these shingles.
The U.S. price (Jim is based in Toronto) is $40 plus $5 shipping. To learn more, visit www.decorativeshingles.com.
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