Why are such unusual roofs being built in China and Japan? The secret is not only originality! There are also practical goals!
Surely you have already paid attention and wondered why in the Middle Kingdom, Japan and some other countries, old houses were built with roofs curved inward?
Usually, everyone answers - they say, this is a design, a feature of culture etc... But the most ancient masters never did anything just like that, and obviously they knew what did not reach modern builders. Not only aesthetic beauty and style, but also the technological need of the design determined such a form.
Of course, it will be much more difficult to make such a roof with two concave edges than a regular roof made of straight beams. Do you think people just made things so difficult for themselves?
Please note that torrential tropical rains are very common in eastern countries. Not only are they strong and plentiful, they can last for weeks or even months. That is why, so that the flow of water not only poured from the roofs of houses, but also diverted as far as possible from the home facade and the base of the house, such roof shapes were made. With their help, the water will roll off the roof like a springboard and fly away as far from the threshold as possible.
To be convinced of this, just look at the rafters of small houses - in them, the beams are bent on purpose.
But there is about this architectural nuance and a few tales.
One of them says that one simple peasant invented a kind of roof to protect himself from evil dragons. They would not just fall from the roof, but fly up like a springboard and not attack the residents of the house.
Another fable is Feng Shui standardization, where special attention is paid to the flow of energy around a person, but we'd better get back to our construction realities.
If we look at the rafter system, we see that it is structurally very complex. This is a post-and-beam structure - it is also called Dou Gong.
Complexity in construction serves two purposes at the same time:
- the roof is carried far beyond the vertical of the wall,
- the roof is much more resistant to earthquakes due to the beam above the support.
It should be remembered that in Japan and China, a lot of territories are in seismically active zones. And engineers used in construction technologies simple principles of extinguishing such activity without destruction of beams - this is why the curvature of Chinese roofs is not just an invention of architecture and design. Rather, it can be attributed to mechanics, logic and sopromat - and people thought of this already several thousand years ago.
This knowledge helped the Chinese to build very tall buildings that can easily withstand earthquakes and are completely protected from rain in tropical seasons. And the tree, as you know, is very afraid of moisture and fungus - it will not stand in the rain for centuries.