The Germans are among the best at designing rooftops of any people in the world. They seem to have mastered drawing your eye beyond the structure to the vanishing point leading to heaven. Maybe they had a lot of practice at it building all those Gothic cathedrals, where they pushed the boundaries of structure and visual drama. One of the tallest cathedrals in the world at the time it was built, Köln Cathedral, could certainly be attributed to German ingenuity and of course, its commitment to Christianity.
For residential buildings, what they do with those steep roofs besides letting the snow slide down in the harsh winters and how they manage volumes of space inside become interesting design problems. Many of the roofs are laden with gabled windows, dormers, and an encyclopedia of architectural terms that could keep a student of architecture googling all night (Julianne make note).
We toured Loschwitz today, a lovely upscale neighborhood in a very elegant part of Pre-war Dresden. Take a look at a sample of my photo survey of roofs. How clever can you get, satisfying the interior functionality and the need for light with the visual balancing act of the exterior?
Photos, from top.
1. One potato
2. Two potato
3. Three potato, blind?
Note: for a list of the tallest buildings in the world at the time they were built, including two in Germany, see http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_and_structures_in_the_world
For more about Loschwitz, see http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschwitz
(Notes on the history of Luisenhof, the restaurant where Hanne and Jens took me last night, is covered in this article).