What Is a Butterfly Roof?

Video Transcript

"I'm Steve Anthony. I'm a carpenter and a home repair remodeling specialist here in New York City. What is a butterfly roof? Essentially a butterfly roof, it's easy to think of it as sort of an inverted roof design. What I mean by that is, in a traditional roof where the roof peaks at the center and sloped off the other side of. Butterfly roof is literally the opposite of that, it's inverted in the sense that the outer walls are higher than the center pitch of the roof. This was a very key architectural element that was present in North America during the middle of the 20th century. It's very easy to recognize architecture of that period by design elements such as the butterfly roof. What that enables you to do is have walls that are full height at the edges of the roof and it also also allows the water to channel down into the center of this butterfly roof and can be drained off and used for many purposes, watering plants even perhaps using as bath water or rinse water, so forth. It's very popular still in places like Hawaii but it's the kind of a design element that you would find in a sort of the atomic age. Some of the other thing butterfly roof allows is a very wide open floor plan, some very dramatic interior designs, too. And there are people who are incorporating that type of design to modern architecture as well. But it is essentially known as a key design element of the atomic age, ie. the mid 30s to the mid 60s in North America."