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Four-sloped roof From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A gambrel or gambrel roof is a usually symmetrical two-sided roof with two slopes on each side. The upper slope is positioned at a shallow angle, while the lower slope is steep. This design provides the advantages of a sloped roof while maximizing headroom inside the building's upper level and shortening what would otherwise be a tall roof, as well as reducing the span of each set of rafters. The name comes from the Medieval Latin word gamba, meaning horse's hock or leg.[1][2] The term gambrel is of American origin,[3] the older, European name being a curb (kerb, kirb) roof.
Europeans historically did not distinguish between a gambrel roof and a mansard roof but called both types a mansard. In the United States, various shapes of gambrel roofs are sometimes called Dutch gambrel or Dutch Colonial gambrel with bell-cast eaves, Swedish, German, English, French, or New England gambrel.
The cross-section of a gambrel roof is similar to that of a mansard roof, but a gambrel has vertical gable ends instead of being hipped at the four corners of the building. A gambrel roof overhangs the façade, whereas a mansard normally does not.
Gambrel is a Norman English word, sometimes spelled gambol such as in the 1774 Boston carpenters' price book (revised 1800). Other spellings include gamerel, gamrel, gambril, gameral, gambering, cambrel, cambering, chambrel[4] referring to a wooden bar used by butchers to hang the carcasses of slaughtered animals.[1] Butcher's gambrels, later made of metal, resembled the two-sloped appearance of a gambrel roof when in use.[5]
Gambrel is also a term for the joint in the upper part of a horse's hind leg, the hock.
In 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote:
Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.—
Born there? Don't say so! I was, too.
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof,—
Standing still, if you must have proof.—
"Gambrel?—Gambrel?"—Let me beg
You'll look at a horse's hinder leg,—
First great angle above the hoof,—
That's the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.)[6]
An earlier reference from the Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1848, defines gambrel as "A hipped roof of a house, so called from the resemblance to the hind leg of a horse which by farriers is termed the gambrel."[7] Webster's Dictionary also confusingly used the term hip in the definition of this roof.
The term is also used for a single mansard roof in France and Germany. In Dutch the term 'two-sided mansard roof' is used for gambrel roofs.
The origin of the gambrel roof form in North America is unknown.[8] The oldest known gambrel roof in America was on the second Harvard Hall at Harvard University built in 1677.[9] Possibly the oldest surviving house in the U.S. with a gambrel roof is the c. 1677–78 Peter Tufts House. The oldest surviving framed house in North America, the Fairbanks House, has an ell with a gambrel roof, but this roof was a later addition.
Claims to the origin of the gambrel roof form in North America include:
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