Roofs from Snow, Hide, Turf and Thatch: Twelve Vernacular Dwellings Compared

An igloo is built of snow cut into blocks by Inuit builders in Canada's Central Arctic and the Qaanaaq area of Greenland. The air pockets trapped in snow insulate, so with outside temperatures as low as minus forty five degrees Celsius body heat alone can hold the interior between about minus seven and sixteen degrees. Its curved catenary shape resists buckling as the snow compresses. It is the starting point because the material is the climate itself.

The tipi is a conical lodge distinguished from other conical tents by the smoke flaps at its top. Plains peoples such as the Sioux, Pawnee, Blackfeet and Crow stretched hides, and later canvas, over wooden poles twelve to twenty five feet long. Quick assembly and disassembly suited a nomadic life. Today tipis remain in use mainly for ceremonial purposes.

A yurt is a portable round tent with a latticework wall, rafters and a crown wheel, covered in felt made from sheep's wool. The Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Mongolians, who call it a ger, can set one up or take it down in as little as thirty minutes. The frame travels on camels or yaks, and the form has housed Central Asian herders for thousands of years.

The hogan, from the Navajo word hooghan, is the primary traditional dwelling of the Navajo people. Timber walls and roof are covered with packed earth and stone, and the form may be round, cone-shaped, multi-sided or square. The doorway traditionally faces east to greet the rising sun. Here the shift from portable shelter to a fixed earth-covered home begins.

Icelandic turf houses have a timber frame, turf walls and a turf roof, and have been built since the ninth century. Turf insulated better than wood or stone alone, and builders framed with native birch because Iceland was only about thirty percent forested at settlement. The burstabaer style, with wooden gable ends called gaflar, emerged in the late eighteenth century and gave way to corrugated iron and concrete.

A blackhouse is a double-walled dry stone house with an earthen core between the walls and a thatched roof. Its central hearth had no chimney, so smoke escaped through the roof and blackened the interior, one proposed origin of the name. People and livestock shared one space at opposite ends. On Lewis it was the term for older houses, as against the newer white houses with rendered walls.

A rondavel is a round or oval hut with stone walls bound by a mortar of sand, soil or cow dung, topped by a conical roof of radial poles with thatch sewn on using grass rope. That roof can take a skilled builder anywhere from a weekend to a year. Found in South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini and Botswana, it survives in modern versions of cement block and corrugated roofing that keep the cone.

A log cabin is built by laying horizontal logs one atop another. Vitruvius described such dwellings in the Pontus region of what is now Turkey, and the earliest log structures in Northern Europe are thought to date to the Bronze Age. The technique developed most in Nordic and Eastern European lands with straight coniferous timber, and in North America it became tied to first-generation frontier homes.

Minka are the traditional vernacular houses of Japan, built for farmers, artisans and merchants. The four main types are noka farmhouses, machiya town houses, gyoka fishermen's dwellings and sanka mountain dwellings. A framework of primary and secondary posts defines the building rather than its floor plan, and local bamboo, reed, shingles, clay and rushes complete it. Interiors divide between an earth-floored work area and a raised wooden floor around an irori hearth.

A siheyuan is a Chinese courtyard enclosed by buildings on all four sides, common in northern China, especially Beijing and rural Shanxi. It originated in the Han Dynasty and peaked in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when a spacious one housing a single large extended family marked wealth and status. The same plan also served palaces, temples, monasteries and administrative buildings.

A haveli is a townhouse or mansion of the Indian subcontinent, its name from the Arabic hawali, meaning partition or private space. The word spread under the Mughal Empire, though multi-story courtyard dwellings in the region date back to around 3300 BC. Over time it came to mean the grand courtyard residences of the merchant classes, and some Vaishnava groups in Gujarat and Rajputana applied it to their temples.

A riad is a garden courtyard of the Maghreb and al-Andalus, classically a rectangular garden divided into four quadrants by two paved paths crossing at a central fountain, with the planting sunk below the paths. Its origin is generally traced to Persian gardens. In present-day Morocco the word also names a guesthouse set within a restored mansion built around such a courtyard.