If Civilizations are judged by their architecture... Flat Roofs?

[KurtNYC]

What does it say about our civilization that we now ignore gravity and thousands of years of design and build so many buildings with flat roofs?

Should we blame Frank Lloyd Wright who's house 'Falling Water' has been nic-named Leaking Water by a string of dissappointed residents? (You can't change the roof there btw because the house is landmarked.) Probably not. There is a huge difference between building one house that blends (sort of) into the gorgeous Pennsylvannia countryside and building hundreds of strip malls, fast food stores and huge box stores.

Architects willful ignore gravity, weather and common sense cranking out on flat roof after another with disasterous results:

There are people trapped inside a Toys 'R' Us store in Prince George's County, where a roof collapsed Saturday. No word on how many people are inside the store in the Landover Hills area. The area got more than a foot of snow last weekend, and it has been raining heavily since Friday.

Would it be so hard to slope the danged roof? Would those ugly boxes be any more ugly if they did? Thinking "outside the box" indeed.

[skylarmae]

1. I love threads like this. I've been wondering the same thing.

once I lived in a new house (high rent) and the only way to get back inside the house once the sprinkling system was turned on was to either:

1: run thru the water to the back door, or;
2: go out the alley and walk around the block to the front door.

Now, is it just me or is this &%^&*)((^&%^&*!!

[KurtNYC]

3. There is a whole bunch of stuff they call "coffee table"

architecture because it looks good when photographed empty. The problems come when people move in and try to LIVE in it.

If you ever hire a designer (for housesm, website, anything) and they mention how your project is going to look in their portfolio, ask for your money back. Let them create unusable stylish stuff on their own dime.

[trotsky]

2. Like so many other pieces of junk in our society... it's about cost.

And short-term thinking.

[KurtNYC]

5. My guess for Target stores, etc is it is a height restriction thing

they want the building as tall as they can get it so they build a box which goes right up to the height limit.

If the roof doesn't collapse it will probably leak and that can't be good for the merchandise inside. The Luxor Hotel in Vegas (big black pyramid) leaks plenty on the few days that rains every year. They put trash cans around the gaming floor but the drips fall so far that they splash right out of the 3 foot cans.

[northzax]

4. hey flat roofs were good enough

for the Greeks, they're good enough for us, damnit! Actually, sloping roofs on a space of that size would be expensive, I believe. Our belief in technology has overcome a millenia of research into butressing and vaulting. All things are new again.

[tridim]

6. It's the city council's fault (height restrictions, etc)

as well as the cheap owners on the commercial side. I used to work as an architect and dealt with it daily. The endless stream of lawyers were a big reason I left the industry.

No excuses for FLW.. Then again I don't like most of his work.

[JVS]

7. Try to imagine how tall a Wal-mart would be if it had a traditional roof

Besides, I think there is an inclination of a few degrees on "flat" roofs to allow for drainage.

[never cry wolf]

8. Speaking as an architect...

Who specializes in industrial buildings, no roof is flat. They all pitch some. Yes, it is more economical but it is also more practical. If you had a building with a 300' depth just how would you propose to build a sloped roof. Wood is out in a building that size due to building codes, prefab steel trusses are too large to transport and field fabricating a steel truss would be very labor intensive and costly.

In addition, sloped roofs have their own variety of problems. For a standard industrial building or strip mall the gutters would have to be HUGE, like 24" wide and 24" deep. What do you do with that water? Spill it onto grade, in many municipaitites that is illegal, not to mention that you would create an ice rink at each downspout in the winter. Sliding snow also plays havoc with gutters, and anything that happens to be underneath it. Leaves, birds nests, etc. also make a gutter system a pain in the ass to maintain, plus they freeze.

With a nominal flat roof system, the roof pitches to roof drains spaced every so often. These run into internal downspouts which never freeze and are piped directly into the storm water management system underground, again, no freezing, no maintenance.

I am not familiar with the building failure you mention above, but the building codes are quite strict as to what a roof load needs to be engineered for. Add to this about 3 layers of safety factors build into all structural design and if engineered and constructed properly there would be no collapses, even under more that design loads. A building that fails generally has human error as the cause. If designed properly, a "flat" roof is a much more efficient receptor for rain and snow than a sloped roof.

[Susang]

9. If there were no flat roofs

Then there wouldn't be any fabulous homes like this:


That would make me sad. :-(

[skygazer]

10. Our neighbors in Vermont

had a house with a flat roof. Not only did it have a flat roof, but there was a sort of parapet around the whole thing, sticking up about a foot. Six feet of snow and ice do nasty things to roofs when there is no way of getting it off.

Amazingly, the house is still there. Even as an 8 year old, I couldn't understand it. (My brother and I had the job of shoveling off our roof. We used to push each other off into the snowbanks created all around - very much fun)