Roofs 101

The roof on your house performs a few different tasks, the main one being to shed rainwater effectively (at least in New Zealand, where it can rain a lot). Given a simple rectangular floor plan, there are two basic roof forms, the hip and the gable, both of which are present at our place:

Hipped roof on our house

Gable on the end of our garage

Other less common roof forms are the gablet, the gambrel, the Dutch gable and the mansard amongst others.  Unfortunately, there are so many different opinions about the definition of each of these that it is difficult do decipher what is 'correct' and what is just common usage (abusage?).

The New Zealand Period House (Arden & Bowman, Random House, 2004) describes a gambrel roof the way a gablet roof is defined in the UK and elsewhere.  I prefer the more descriptive 'hip and gable' which is used in Asia to denote a temple style roof, although the term Dutch gable is often used here, despite it looking nothing like the gable on a Dutch house.

Gablet or is that Gambrel? Or Dutch Gable? Photo: Bill Bradley

A gambrel roof in the US (think hay barn) would be described as a mansard roof in NZ, and possibly the UK, although mansard applies more correctly to a hipped or four sided version, not the one below:

Gambrel or is it Mansard? Photo: Steel Frame Concepts

Back to my copy of The New Zealand Period House, they describe a Dutch gable roof the way a half hip or Dutch hip is described elsewhere:

Half Hip or is it Dutch Hip? Or Dutch Gable? From Houseplans24.com

So you can see that there are very clearly defined definitions for the various basic roof styles.

Well, I'm glad I cleared that one up!  And this is just a roof on a rectangular box.  Introduce a non-rectangular floor plan with bays, lean-to's, valleys, clerestoreys etc, perhaps a flat or skillion roof, then we can look at framed roofs versus the trussed variety, purlins, battens, chords and webs, rafters, stringers, barges, soffits.... 

Public Transport Eh?

I work from home, but my wife has just started back at work in the city, which means a drive and two buses; a drive, a bus and a train; or just driving all the way.  At the moment, as in the past, she is using one of the public transport options but today's experience may be enough to put her off for good.

I will spare you the details, but lets just say the bus broke down on the motorway, the replacement bus didn't stop in time, the replacement replacement bus was going to the wrong place and... ok, you get the picture.  

It got me thinking about the last time I broke down on the motorway in a car.  It was when I was a student and I was driving a rusty old 1970 Holden Kingswood.  Cars now are reliable.  They rarely break down and are vastly improved on my set of student wheels.  One the other hand, I quite frequently see a broken down bus on the side of the road, with the familiar heavy duty tow truck in attendance.  Given that they make up only a small proportion of vehicles this would be somewhat of a concern.  Why is this?  The buses themselves seem relatively new.  Is it that much harder to make a bus reliable, compared with, say, a modern truck?

Reinventing the Door

This novel variation on the common door comes from Austrian artist Klemmens Torggler.  Thanks to Twisted Sifter (again) for the link.

Here's another one made from 10mm plate steel.

Very cool.

The New Era

It's often said that we live in changing times and that the pace of technology and social revolutions seem to be almost exponential.  Since the beginning of the millennium we have seen 9/11, the birth of the Euro, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, the Asian tsunami, the Japan earthquake, 3D printing and drone strikes.  But is our era really any different from the past or do we just look at it through our own myopic viewpoint?

The French have the term fin de siecle (literally end of the century) to describe the turn of the previous century but also the political and cultural changes that were happening at that time.

The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893

Many 'isms' apply to this period: rationalism, materialism, surrealism, positivism, pessimism, social Darwinism and nationalism, which led to the upheavals of the First World War, which in turn led to fascism and the Second World War.  

HG Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, in which the protagonist travels to the distant future to learn what becomes of humanity and witnesses a dying earth.  The irony for me is that if I had a time machine, top of my list of destinations would be to head right back to where he came from: the late Victorian era and the turn of the twentieth century.

Here are some random fascinating events that were happening around this time:

The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889.  It was the tallest building in France until 2004 with the completion of the Millau Viaduct, which I have previously blogged about here and referred to in this blog here.

Wikipedia

New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote in 1893.

Kate Sheppard, 1905

In London, the first proper 'Tube' railway was opened in 1890.  It ran from the City of London to Stockwell (about 5km), under the Thames.

London Underground

By the time of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, London's population had reached 6.6 million and it has not varied greatly since then.  In 1801 it was less than a million, making the fin de siecle a time of great change, for Londoners at least.

Small Medium Large

One of the nice things about growing your own, or even making your own, is the variety that comes with things that are not sorted into a narrow classification of what is 'normal' or 'optimal'.

 

The big egg is a double yolk special from our largest Austalorp, who has since decided to hot foot it back to her friends next door.