What is a Slate Roof?

The slate house is built with stone strips or blocks, and the wall can be 5 to 6 meters high; it is covered with slate and is weatherproof. In short, except for the purlins and rafters, which are made of wood, the rest are all made of stone. Everything is simple and glorious, as solid as gold soup. This kind of house is warm in winter and cool in summer, moisture-proof and fire-proof, but its lighting is poor.

Slate room

(House built of stone or stone)

The most unique feature of the Buyi slate house is its roof. Most of the buildings are suspended from the top of the mountain, and the roofs are drained by double slopes. Some villages of the Buyi ethnic group use scaly roofs that are more neatly cut.The thickness of each stone piece is about 2 cm. They are stacked high and low, and they are scattered like a fish scale. It is the wisdom of the Buyi people to lay these different shapes of rubble like tiles without stacking them too thickly. The stone pieces form a natural arc on the roof, which is conducive to drainage without leaving a drainage ditch like a tiled roof.

The roof ridge does not use ridge tiles, but extends the stone piece on one side of the roof, presses the other side piece, and then lays neat stone pieces like tiles on the roof ridge to form a ridge. Larger slate is used on the edge of each slope of the roof, and a smaller one is used in the middle. This is not only conducive to forming the roof curve, but also firm and sturdy, and it is not easy to be lifted off by the wind. Some roofs will replace a piece of stone with glass to facilitate daylighting. However, the stone fragments on the roof will be renovated about a decade or so to replace the weathered stones.

The thin slabs on the roof, any scale formed by clever cloth, are naturally natural, giving people a strong sense of beauty.

1 Housing Foundation: The residential houses are built on the mountain, and generally have higher platform foundations. The front base of the house built on the slope doubles as a retaining wall, and the rear is 30-50 cm higher than the ground. The surrounding area is built with stones or pieces of stone, and the internal filling is compacted and leveled. The dwellings for raising livestock follow the steps on the stone road directly into the room, and the semi-underground relationship between the livestock and the outdoor is formed. The indoor floor is paved with slate, which is flat and moisture-proof.

2 Doors and windows: The entire periphery of the door is made of a single piece of stone, and a lower threshold is left in the lower part, and the size of the opening is small. The opening of the window is also relatively small. The top of the hole is made of pointed arches, round arches, stone beams, and other forms, and there are single holes and juxtaposed holes.

The door of a few dwelling houses is centered on the door axis on one side and deflected 45 degrees inward, which not only effectively blocks the sight of passing people, but also forms a very interesting small space at the door. This suitable processing method has the same effect as the limitation of the line of sight by the shadow wall in the courtyard.

3 Decoration: The key point of the decoration of the slate room is to handle the "Longkou" symbolizing auspiciousness at the gable of the gable. The "Longkou" on the front facade is finely processed, and the stone pillars at the corners have both whole columns and connecting columns. They are all finely carved and matched with the selected dragon mouth and the wall surface, appearing coarse and fine. The overall decoration of the slate house is simple, natural, and has no artificial feeling.

With the continuous development of society and the continuous evolution of culture, the slate houses of the Buyi people are constantly updated and developed with the promotion of new technologies. Partial Buyi villages have gradually erected two-story small buildings with white tiles across the country. Some villages have developed tourism resources. Many houses only retain the roof form, which is really a pity. In any case, there are indeed many ideas and techniques in the traditional slate house buildings that we now need to design. The wonderful Buyi slate house is indeed a wonderful work in our national architecture.