All my childhood, my room had a window overlooking a tin roof (made of sealed together sheets of thin tin sheeting... not the corrugated tin roof you'd find on a shed, or a tropical home). So my memory of rain is associated with the tip-tapping of drops on metal. I'm very fond of the sound. I hope one day to live in a house with a standing-seam roof.
Having grown up in a modern home, I'm used to thinking of roofs as solid, impermeable protection against the elements, but it's only a couple hundred years since the typical home needed to include a place for the smoke from the open central fire to rise up and out. Not that space is necessarily a hole: the "blackhouses" of the Scottish highlands and islands depended on smoke leaking up through the heavy thatching to provide additional waterproofing.
My friend Gary has a tipi, which he has regularly brought out to the Renaissance Festival I've danced at off and on for 20+ years now. I've slept in it a few times, and it was rain that presented the worst problems... not from roof leakage, as there is a rain flap that protects the interior, but from trickles in on the ground.
I seem to be flailing a bit here. What strikes me about most roofs is that while there is a huge variety in form and material, there is one basic principle: slope for drainage. It's so obvious it hardly seems to bear notice, but all our tools for keeping the rain off share this basic principle: water falls, and when provided with a slope, it falls while moving horizontally in the direction.
I wonder how far back the first tool was made that took advantage of this? Although sheltering under trees (which drain under a similar priniciple) has been around as long as animals have wanted to avoid a drenching...
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