In pre-WWII Berlin, the shape of your roof was a political decision
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Flat roofs always leak. My roof has a 45 degree pitch, as I hate leaks. I also replaced the asphalt shingles with metal, because metal is lighter (less earthquake damage), doesn't burn, and will last the rest of my life.
Another oddity around here is vanishing eaves. My house has 2 foot eaves. This keeps the exterior walls dry, and they last a lot longer. Keeps the windows from rotting, too. And the house shaded in the summer.
New houses are lucky to have a 1 inch eave. I don't get it. Eaves are one of the cheapest ways to reduce maintenance costs.
Up here in Vancouver, they decided to start counting the area under the eaves as part of the permitted square footage back in the '90s. No surprise, eaves immediately disappeared from new construction and we had a decade of water damaged buildings that needed expensive remediation.
Here in London, a flat roof means you can add on an extra floor (raising the property value) without towering above adjacent homes (which would make it hard to get approval to build)
Does it leak? Not in the first few years - and if you're a house builder, anything after that is the buyer's problem.
Flat roofs don’t have to leak. I’m doing an EPDM roof on my garden office at the moment. It’s a single huge sheet of rubber.
As others have pointed out, the lack of eaves is the real killer. My dad was over from NZ in the summer and he was saying that fashion is there too. It’s causing all sorts of water issues for buildings.
I had a garage with a flat roof once. There was a big snowstorm. So much snow landed on the roof that it bent so the doors wouldn't open. After I got on it and shoveled for a couple hours, the doors would then open.
Triangular shapes are very resistant to bending.
None of the responsible architects, nor developers, nor builders, nor Realtors pay those maintenance costs. And most of the folks buying houses these days are either indifferent, or oblivious, to the problem.
For example, the washer and water heater are in the basement. The concrete floor under them is slightly sloped, leading to a drain. I've had multiple failures with washing machine hoses and leaks, and leaking hot water heaters. They resulted in zero damage, unlike in other places I lived.
Another one is Seattle homes always have wooden decks. The decks rot after a while, sometimes killing people when they collapse. The rot comes from being endlessly damp, and the local ants nesting in them. The last such deck I had I sawed off of the house, and it collapsed into a pile of sawdust. I was horrified.
So my current house has a concrete deck. Yay, no problems at all!
Here's another goodie. Never, ever, ever have the driveway slope towards your garage. Your garage will inevitably flood. A gutter in front of the door won't help, as it will clog with leaves, sticks, ice, and slush, and your garage will flood.
Also have the garage floor slope ever so slightly towards the door. The only way you can tell mine is sloped is its a lot harder to push the car into the garage than push it out. The slope helps if a car has a major malfunction, and you don't want oil/gas/antifreeze soaking into the walls.
What was weird is the architect and the general contractor were completely uninterested in these things.
I should write a book - "Things Your Architect Doesn't Know and Your General Contractor Won't Tell You"
My previous house had two structural weak spots that resulted in the house bending and sagging. I identified one in this house as it was being built and had it fixed. Being a mechanical engineer has its advantages! I discovered that architects know nothing about structures. The structure was also compromised when the plumbing was put in, so I worked with the GC to design a fix.
...by WalterBright.
Sold! When can I pre-order?
Being able to influence the design and construction of my house was immensely satisfying. Both the architect and the GC thought I was nuts with a lot of the ideas, but since I wrote the checks I prevailed.
Another one was the counter tops were inches higher than normal. They're just easier to work on that way, and the bonus was they were too high for The Cat to jump on. I also hate kitchen islands, and so don't have one.
A big mistake I made was not making it wheelchair accessible. That would have cost nothing extra, but I know people who had to remodel their home or were forced to move because they got stuck in a wheelchair.
I did the low voltage wiring myself because the electrician didn't understand it. Every room has 2 sets of cat5 and RG6 coax. Wifi has improved considerably since then, but I still enjoy the reliability, privacy and speed of wired connectivity.
GFCI breakers on all circuits in the circuit panel.
I failed to add wiring for a generator, this later turned out to be an expensive upgrade. Puget Sound Energy uses overhead wires, which fail regularly.
French drains around the basement, as a damp basement is a relentless horror.
Have you ever scraped the bottom of your car pulling into a driveway? I have. I told the concrete contractor to not have any abrupt changes in slope, and if my car scrapes he's going to have to redo it. He laughed, and said no problem. And it was no problem, he did a beautiful job just as I asked! The neighbors scrape their cars on their driveways.
Another little thing is the edges of the driveway are rolled up an inch or so. This means you can back up, and know when you're at the edge by the feel. Nobody else does that. This is so valuable because of the slope and soft ground off the driveway - you'll get hung up if you drop the wheels over the edge.
The house is designed to make use of the "stack effect" to keep it cool in summer. It works ok, but it could have been better. Houses used to be built to be naturally warm in winter and cool in summer, but the advent of A/C has caused it to be forgotten.
Oh, and fire sprinklers. I did a search and could not find any instance of people dying in a sprinkled building fire. They're expensive though. Ouch.
I wish there was a similar book for weed control. When I research it, I get two extremes - spreading deadly poison, or ineffectual methods.
Another pro-tip for Seattle is never buy house on the bottom of the hill or on top of the hill (yes, this only leaves hill-side). On the bottom you'll always be flooded during the winder, on the top you'll get crazy winds and rain banging during the storms.
In Japan I saw a washer in the 2nd floor of an apartment sitting on top of what looked like a shower basin. If the machine leaked it is caught by the basin. Granted that will not stop a leak in the water line from spraying beyond the edges of the basin but something like shower stall walls could mitigate that.
Besides, who needs the dang noise it makes. Banish it to the basement.
Flat roofs probably did always leaked when they learned this saying -- but today it's not true.
But if flat ones are harder to design right, then they're more likely not to be designed right, so we end up with a larger number of edge cases where they're going to perform worse.
Do you mean the roofs or the boomers?
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” - Thomas Sowell
funny how that applies in other areas of life.
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."
So how much you agree with the applicability of the quote might depend on whether, say, you think the education and race relations in 1993 were better or worse than they were in 1963.
Now, especially in the US, we just build the same types of houses everywhere.
As you note, this does come with tradeoffs, like most things.
Not a builder, nor do I have any particular knowledge of building science beyond reading Fine Homebuilding.
Modern membrane roofs last longer, leak less, and are more energy efficient.
Are you sure about energy efficiency? A properly designed peaked roof can make use of the "stack effect" to keep it cool. The slope accelerates the breeze, and sucks the hot air out of the ridge vent (or cupola). The attic still gets hot, but that gets hot instead of the upper floor.
Asphalt shingles are such an out-dated technology, people should really try to avoid them on new builds. They don't last long, the thermal characteristics are bad, and they're prone to leaks.
Anything that goes through the roof disrupts this, so skylights, vents, chimneys, fans, antennas, etc., all are points of concern.
Most metal roofs I've installed use rubber-gasket-screws, but clients that can afford "seamless" do [it will shed water indefinitely, with no screwholes to eventually leak].
The asphalt shingles will crack over time, and crack when you walk on them, leading to leaks.
I hate the cedar shake roofs, because they mildew and wasps nest in them.
Some things I was warned about but did anyway. The insulation is icynene foam. Some foams disintegrate over time, but this one has not at all. It's far more effective than fiberglass, no breathing in fiberglass, no mildew. I'm very pleased with it.
(The GC made me take full responsibility for it!)
most of the new Seattle flat roofs are townhomes with no backyard to speak of, because there are townhomes where that would be.
I don't remember if it had a flat roof, but probably most office buildings did.
are we talking about the same building? The one I'm talking about was a high-ceilinged single room:
https://www.dezeen.com/2017/06/14/frank-lloyd-wright-johnson...
i would be perfectly fine with regulators enforcing sloping roofs by default and only allowing flat ones if you explicitly and deliberately apply for an exception
it would save lots of unknowing homeowners easily preventable problems stemming from flat-roof McArchitect homes that look modern but aren't practical, and allow the ardent individual flat-roofers (lol) to get what they want if they absolutely must
That said, when people start throwing gardens onto their roofs, or otherwise doing things that the roof was not originally designed for, things get iffy.
at best it gets rid of running water under perfect conditions
Random every day person, were they aware of this debate, and did they actually shop for housing based on roof shape?
Its also important to understand that the buildings in question were meant specifically as worker housing, so it was a collective project funded by workers' unions, each with particular ideologies. If you were part of the liberal housing co-op that advocated for flat roofs, you were gonna live in the flat-roof buildings. That is to say, you didn't express your politics by choosing your roof, rather, you chose your politics, and your available roof shapes were informed by that choice.
hey Walter: have you heard of snow? It's known to fall in Berlin. Not so much in Jerusalem.
No. The aesthetic dimension to architecture is critical because buildings constitute our environment and affect our psychology and how we interact with one another.
Would you rather have lunch in a beautiful piazza in northern Italy, or in a purely functional American strip mall / parking lot?
Would you rather live in a cozy cottage in the Cotswolds, or in a commie block in Petrograd?
Should a courthouse reflect the majesty and seriousness of its purpose, or should it reflect the ridiculous dadaism of a peculiar architect?
Buildings are not merely functional and they are not merely art. They are the environment that conditions the daily experience of the community, and because of their persistence and constant action on the public mind, we should take care how they form a home for civic life.
That's not all you have to do. I'll let people who've owned houses in snowy climates amplify that.
In a building, water is your eternal enemy. Keeping it out of places where it doesn't belong accounts for a good part of the other things you have to do.
I am also familiar with the climate of Berlin, where it barely snows, and when it does snow, it only very rarely accumulates.
Though the common modern understanding of it does lend itself to 'brute'. I think one of the real issues was the post WWII era of 1950s to 1980s was a time of focus on low cost construction with an overconfidence in the forgiving nature of concrete combined with a fair amount of corruption in the factory supplied components - at least in the UK which I'm more familiar with.
It can be done well, and I point to the Barbican in London as an example. With better construction techniques it can last a lot longer with less maintenance cost.
English brute and French brut (raw) both seem to come from the Latin brutus.
The brutalist-does-not-mean-ugly architecture I usually point to is the Washington Metro.
https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/architecture/our-build...
To me, this looks more like an East Berlin apartment building for the Communist Party elites. Not as ugly as the workers' buildings, but that's not saying much.
> Brutalism is an architectural style of the 20th century that mainly uses concrete as a building material. The term "brutalism" comes from the French expression "béton brut", which means "raw concrete".
https://industrialkonzept.com/blogs/magazine/beton-brut-berl...
Meanwhile pretty much the worst architecture you'll find anywhere would have to be the strip mall architecture (and most office complexes, and much suburban housing) created in the U.S. from the mid 1970s onwards (up until then it had at least some semblance of style). And now basically copy-pasta'd all over much of the world.
In my view it's arguably even uglier, because it symbolizes a system in which people thought they were more free, original and infinitely wealthier then their counterparts in the supposedly drab, miserable, totalitarian East. (It was all those things to some extent; and folks in the West were categorically more free -- just not nearly to the extent that they typically thought).
In fact, so deeply threatened were the new overlords in the West by the very idea that the socialist system could also produce beautiful and vibrant public spaces that they felt they just had to destroy one of its crowning achievements (the Palast der Republik, also in Berlin), and at a stupendously great cost -- and replace it with something basically garish, entirely fake (by design), and far less inviting and useful -- just to make a point.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurter_Tor
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Republic,_Berlin
That's like asking which is worse: pancreatic cancer or Huntington's Chorea?
both pretty bad. Wouldn't want either.
Here is some background about the GDR Palast der Republik demolition. It's German, but Google can translate that page for you: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/geschichte-... -- it's pretty interesting really, lots of details.
The GDR used 5000 tons of sprayed asbestos even though it had been banned since 1969 even in the GDR but they exempted this new project. That is why there had to be a huge asbestos removal project. It was sprayed directly onto the massive steel construction, so not easily removed. Only the bare steel shell remained at the end.
However, the argument is that they did not have to remove the Palast entirely and could have rebuild it after asbestos removal. I was inside as a GDR teenager, it sure was an impressive looking building. I'm not sure how political or technical the final decision to go ahead with its demolition was, too late now anyway, and I don't feel all that strongly about it even as ex GDR citizen. I think given that they had to pretty much completely dismantle the whole thing down to the steel skeleton makes it hard to fault them for going that one step further. The article I linked makes an argument that it should have been kept and used.
The articledoes point out though that three different Bundestag legislatures all overwhelmingly voted for the demolition, with three different sets of parliament compositions, so that it definitely was a democratic decision, and it came after lots and lot of public discussion. Even the article, voicing a different opinion, concedes that that was the case and that the democratic process was "exemplary".
That's why I think you should be careful using this example the way you did there, I don't think that the description of how that happened supports such a claim. One also has to point out that it was supported by plenty of people from the ex-GDR too, this wasn't dictated by the West Germans.
But being as the issue was decided by Bundestag, that would mean it was ultimately decided by Wessis, by definition. Largely on the basis of it a "symbol of the Dictatorship" (and as a snub to Gysi) and all that. And as far as public opinion in the East was concerned -- I don't know if it's the last word on the matter, but we do have this one poll result at least:
Nach einer Umfrage der Zeitschrift «Super Illu» lehnen 60 Prozent der befragten Ostdeutschen einen Palast-Abriss ab, weil damit «wieder ein Stück DDR-Geschichte plattgemacht wird». Zugleich sprach sich die Mehrheit aber für eine dauerhafte Grünfläche anstelle der historischen Schlossfassade aus. Befragt worden waren 1005 Menschen in den neuen Ländern. (tso/dpa)
That tabloid is hardly representative!
That's not controversial my friend. They should absolutely be beautiful. This is a belief that has been held for thousands of years up until the advent of the late 20th century.
The belief has held through to today, too. The difference is that there was a huge explosion in the global population - especially the middle class - to the point that all the crappy houses and apartment buildings people could actually afford to live in vastly overwhelmed the buildings with pretty architecture.
Lol this is the frog on a lillypad of nationalism/tribalism. There is only 1 sky. You might as well say other moons.
"The fact that you behave different shows me that you are different and are therefore wrong"
Glad to know people's nationalism/tribalism was just as dumb then as it is now.