A conical roof or cone roof is a cone-shaped

roof A roof ( : roofs or rooves) is the top covering of a building, including all materials and constructions necessary to support it on the walls of the building or on uprights, providing protection against rain, snow, sunlight, extremes of t ...

that is circular at its base and terminates in a point.

Distribution

Conical roofs are frequently found on top of towers in

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...

town

fortifications A fortification is a military construction or building designed for the defense of territories in warfare, and is also used to establish rule in a region during peacetime. The term is derived from Latin ''fortis'' ("strong") and ''face ...

and

castle A castle is a type of fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by military orders. Scholars debate the scope of the word ''castle'', but usually consider it to be the private fortified r ...

s, where they may either sit directly on the outer wall of the tower (sometimes projecting beyond it to form

eaves The eaves are the edges of the roof which overhang the face of a wall and, normally, project beyond the side of a building. The eaves form an overhang to throw water clear of the walls and may be highly decorated as part of an architectural styl ...

) or form a superstructure above the fighting platform or terrace of the tower. The latter necessitated the use of spouts to lead the water away over the top of the walls (e.g. as at Andernach's ''Alter Krahnen''). In this case the cone roof was surrounded by a protective wall, a

parapet A parapet is a barrier that is an extension of the wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/breast'). ...

or a battlement. Such conical roofs were usually constructed using a

timber-frame Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden ...

d support structure covered with

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...

; more rarely they were made of masonry. A small circular

turret Turret may refer to: * Turret (architecture), a small tower that projects above the wall of a building * Gun turret, a mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon * Objective turret, an indexable holder of multiple lenses in an optical microscope * M ...

or tourelle with a conical roof is called a pepperpot or pepperbox turret. Today, conical roofs are more often used in rural areas either for circular or small square buildings. They are difficult to construct but use locally available materials. Conical roofs are widely used in Armenian and Georgian

church architecture Church architecture refers to the architecture of buildings of churches, convents, seminaries etc. It has evolved over the two thousand years of the Christian religion, partly by innovation and partly by borrowing other architectural styles as ...

. A key feature of the Solomon Islands Parliament Building is its conical roof.

References

Roofs {{Architecturalelement-stub

Distribution

See also

References