Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’
What page are you on Devin?
@Devin wrote:
Ok so the next logical question is: what’s in the roof of No. 32?
Does it have the front-to-back beam under the central valley, and/or other early roof structure? Or is it evidently a later Georgian construction?
There nothing in the roof apex of a twin Billy, there’s isn’t an attic storey, that’s the point.
Yes there is a beam running front to back under the valley on the line of the partition between the two front rooms on the top floor, and it continues over the back room where it beds into the brick arch of the window.
The pitch of the roof is too shallow to match the rest of the construction detail, so yes, like the Paddy Whelan house on Cork St., the roof joists must have been renewed later, but otherwise the builders re-used the original footings, the side wall plates and the defining beam in the centre, and just replaced the roof, like for like, but with hipped profiles behind a flat parapet to the front.
The twin roof at 25 James St. shows us that the roof pitch would have been somewhere between 48 and 50 degrees, . . . . unless that doesn’t exist either :rolleyes:
@Devin wrote:
On an architectural level, twin gables on a two-bay building wouldn’t have produced much of an effect, would it? …. sorry, just have difficulty bringing myself to envisage this building with twin gables.
”Much of an effect” !!! compared with what? . . . Georgian flat parapets as far as the eye can see?
The sophistication lay in the rhythm, varying the musical notes, as opposed to your Georgian; dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb . . .
@Devin wrote:
Just to illustrate my suggestion.
No Devin, . . . just no!
It was this, or something very close to this. Don’t let Bord Pleanála off the hook on this!
This house was a ‘Billy’, the floor plans scream that out. However, there’s no way you can put a single ‘Billy’ roof on this house without, either making it 5 storey, which the stairs evidence doesn’t support, or by reducing the present top storey to an attic storey, which the evidence of the beam and the return profile won’t support. Why try to force it to fit into a standard Billy template, when it makes perfect sense as a twin-Billy?
I think twins were legion across the city, maybe up to 10% of all Dutch Billys were twins, of one kind or another. If we follow the evidence of roof profiles from rear views and aerial shots, there was another twin-Billy at no. 123, directly opposite this house (demolished in the 60s). Personally I think the Dutch Billy builders were enthralled by the rhythm of the streetscapes they were creating and they literally couldn’t get enough gables in. Twins would also have been something of a status symbol, in that they emulated the grand, four and five bay, multi-gabled houses of the very wealthy.
@Devin wrote:
. . . hey, the thread would be boring without different views …
What do you mean, . . . boring?
