Roof turret

Roof turret of Cologne Cathedral

A roof turret or bell turret is a turret sitting on the roof ridge of a building, which is mostly made of wood, is open at the side and serves as a bell cage. A roof turret is usually not bricked, but placed on the roof structure with wooden posts using carpentry technology and then slated or provided with a metal layer ( lead , copper ).

history

Roof turrets gained importance among the Cistercians and mendicant orders from the 12th century, whose rules forbade magnificent tower buildings. Roof turrets can often be found on chapels and small or narrow churches. The oldest ridge turrets are on Gotland country churches . In Gothic cathedrals with West tower systems is crossing tower at the point where nave and transept cross, often carried out in the form of a ridge turret (z. B. Altenberg Cathedral , Cologne Cathedral , Amiens Cathedral , Notre-Dame de Paris ). If the roof turret is above the choir of a church, one speaks of a choir turret.

Many roof turrets are not original - they were damaged by wind and weather or even blown down and later replaced; others are 19th century imitations or inventions.

In the late Middle Ages , roof turrets were also found on secular structures or over a gable . Roof skylights with bell there are often mansions whose gatehouses , on large farms , buildings of the fire service , town halls and mining Huthäusern .

Today private houses are also provided with ridge turrets in the form of individual roof figures . The village of Seckach in the Neckar-Odenwald district, for example, has over fifty such roof decorations, mainly designed by local artists.

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  Large roof turret of the Maulbronn monastery church (Cistercian abbey)

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  Small roof turret of the Maulbronn monastery church

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  Roof ridge on the town hall of Burgebrach

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  Roof ridge in Poland

See also

• Lantern (architecture)

literature

• Hans Vogts : Roof tab. In: Real Lexicon on German Art History . Vol. III (1953), Col. 968-976 ( online ).
• Theodor Landsberg : Roof Truss Construction. In: Eduard Schmitt: Roofs in general. Roof shapes. (= Handbuch der Architektur III, Volume 2, Issue 4) 3rd edition, Darmstadt 1911, pp. 216–20 ( digitized Dachreiter , 1st edition 1897 ).
• Meyer's Encyclopedic Lexicon . Bibliographisches Institut, Lexikonverlag, Mannheim / Vienna / Zurich 1975, Volume 6, p. 162.

Web links

Commons : Roof tab  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wiktionary: Roof tabs  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

• Roof tab - definition (archipendium)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans Vogts : Roof tab. In: Real Lexicon on German Art History . Vol. III (1953), Col. 968-976 ( online ), accessed April 23, 2019.