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 |  | Editors: Barbara Burren,
Martin Tschanz, Christa Vogt
Niggli Verlag
ISBN 978-3-7212-0680-7
Digital media, globalisation, ecology and new materials – this quartet of themes (along with the accompanying theory) has dominated architectural publications in recent years. However, a reverse trend has recently become noticeable. Publishers and authors (particularly university lecturers) are becoming more concerned with passing on a knowledge of the basics. Their reasoning is that today’s students are once more in need of concrete design and construction help. For this reason, we are seeing ever more handbooks on presentation techniques, design strategies and common construction-related questions on the shelves of bookshops.
Although it is not a construction or design handbook, the new book from the Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (ZHAW) Winterthur also falls into the ”basic knowledge” category. It concerns the historical origins and design possibilities of one of the most versatile construction elements in architecture – the pitched roof. As little as 15 years ago, the choice of subject would have been understood as a political statement.
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Inclined roofs were considered conservative at best and at worst backward. To be considered a progressive architect, one had to be a master of the flat roof, an element that symbolised modernity.
Today, the entrenched ideological positions have been abandoned. The avant‑garde have discovered the pitched roof, freeing it from its nostalgia stereotype. In building such as the Yokohama Ferry Terminal by Foreign Office Architects or the Casa da Música in Porto, both flat and pitched roofs appear in a new synergy, sweeping away the negative historical connotations. Even in residential architecture, there have been significant changes. Hochschule Winterthur’s book presents a sequence of historical and up-to-the-moment examples side by side, sorted by design rather than by date.
In the foreword, the editors write that they had no intention of taking a didactic approach, or even of making the book readily understandable. Rather, the book is in the tradition of Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture and Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects. Subjective, collage‑like pages of illustrations are accompanied by short text that make lateral connections between the buildings depicted. The chapters, with headings like ”Roof and context”, ”Roof as symbol” and ”Roof and light”, each begin with pictures and end with a short essay. The variety in the essays testifies to the many facets of the subject. The authors examine modern architecture’s ‘roof war’ between the champions of flat roofs and pitched roofs respectively, the tradition of the ‘tent spaces’ in historical palaces and residential houses, the symbolic value of open wooden roof trusses and roof constructions by the Swedish architect Klas Anselm. Most of this is instructive, if sometimes rather divorced from everyday practicalities. The Pitched Roof’s large number of illustrations,however, provide a wealth of inspiration for design work – far more so, in fact, than the presently common affordable large-format ”architecture picture books”, which often lack focus.
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