| OCR Text |
Show Figure 138: The two components of the house: the geometric block and the independent roof frame (After Brunskill, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacular Architecture). first task involved laying out and giving three-dimensional form to the geometric block. Four load-bearing walls were fabricated from a variety of materials to produce the basic rectangle. The builder's second move was to top the building off by setting upon it an essentially independent roof frame consisting of paired, triangulated rafters. While supported by the walls, this roof frame was structurally separate from the basic house • form and remained unaffected by the use of particular wall construction techniques or materials (figure 138). This chapter is divided into t wo sections, one looking at the various materials and techniques for building the geometric block, the other 249 |
