Some people might argue over politics or what kind of music is appropriate for a wedding reception, but what people who love architecture argue about is shutters.  They argue about everything from the proper shutter-to-window ratio to whether hinges and shutter dogs have to be functional.  It’s pretty amusing to see the kind of heated dialogue that can happen in comment sections.  So, let’s talk about it. We recently installed vinyl shutters on our house, selecting a size and scale that matched the existing shutters on other windows and likely the original shutters on this 1970 brick ranch house.  I did this knowing full well that they are not proper shutters.  Most of the shutters on American homes built in the last 50 years aren’t proper shutters.  Most of them are strictly decorative, and they aren’t even trying to pretend that they are functional shutters.  Americans collectively decided somewhere along