Search engine "BING" has a picture of Gaspe today with the buildings below. Their red roofs make me think of old traditions. Are red roofs an old tradition?
Yes. They were made of clay tiles. They are still on traditional houses in Europe. Pictures of Prague are spectacular.
The pictures that come up are Red Roof Inns and what else? Pizza Hut! Here's the story from Pizza Hut. The article has left out the names of the founders. I can only assume this is purposeful. They are Dan and Frank Carney and opened the first Pizza Hut in 1958.
"The red roof design didn’t come along until 1969, when the restaurant brand started to grow internationally. The two brothers began to worry about competition, and started to think about new, creative ways to distinguish their Pizza Hut restaurants. The brothers called up a college friend and fraternity brother who happened to be an architect and artist in Wichita: Richard D. Burke. As the story goes, Burke had originally charged the brothers a hefty upfront fee that the fledgling pizza start-up wasn’t able to scrape together. Instead, they offered Burke $100 per store built using his design, never guessing that Pizza Hut would become the global company that it is today. One of the architects who worked with Burke reports that the red roof design was a fusion of common sense, the architectural taste of the 1950s, and a need for the design to be both remarkable and appealing in a variety of locations. The same year the design was being drafted, Pizza Hut expanded to their first locations in Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Australia."
The Wikipedia entry says that the iconic Pizza Hut building style was designed in 1963 by Chicago architect George Lindstrom. So it likely is the roof that was designed by Richard D. Burke.
This is the logo used from 1974 to 1999. It has that famous red roof. It looks perfect on top of the Seagram Distillers Building in Waterloo. | 
