Carpentry and joinery of roofs

The word Roof expresses the covering of a house or building, by which its inhabitants or contents are protected from the injuries of the weather. A roof is not only an essential part of a house, but it even seems to be its characteristic feature; as, for example, the roofs of palatial, public, and private buildings in France, which are denominated the Mansard Roof, and more essentially the picturesque roofs of the ancient Chateaux of France. The upper structures of houses in Turin have a most picturesque effect, and not so much in England (although many interesting examples still exist) as we might desire to see.

The Greeks, who have perhaps excelled all nations in taste, and who have given the most perfect model of architectonic ordonnance within a certain limit, never erected a building which did not exhibit the roof in the distinctest manner; and though they borrowed much of their model from the Orientals, as will be evident to anyone who compares their architecture with the ruins of Persepolis, and of the tombs in the mountains of Shiraz, they added that form of roof which their own climate taught them was necessary for sheltering them from the rains. The roofs in Persia and Arabia are flat, but those of Greece are, without exception, sloping. It seems, therefore, a gross violation of the principles of taste in architecture, to take away or hide the roof of a house; and it must be ascribed to that rage for novelty which is so powerful in the minds of the rich. Our ancestors seemed to be of a very different opinion, and turned their attention to the ornamenting of their roofs as much as any other part of the building. They showed them in the most conspicuous manner, running them up to a great height, broke them into a thousand fanciful shapes, and stuck them full of highly dressed windows. We laugh at this, and call it Gothic and clumsy; and our great architects conceal the roof altogether by parapets, balustrades, and other contrivances. Our forefathers certainly did offend against the maxims, of true taste, when they enriched a part of a house with marks of elegant habitation, which every spectator must know to be a cumbersome garret: but their successors no less offend, who take off the cover of the house altogether and make it impossible to know whether it is not a mere screen or colonnade we are looking at.