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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe no one at any step of the process gave them a warning about flat roofs, huge glass windows, having a pool, etc. in frigid mountain areas with tons of snow. I feel like there must be a lot more to this story, like cycling through different architects and engineers until one would finally not tell them the idea was bonkers.

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A flat green roof. Which is much worse than just a flat roof.

The drainage will clog and they’ll risk having a leaky roof every spring. And you can’t get up there with a snow shovel because it’s a green roof and you’d scrape off all the dirt and plants.

I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete? Flat roofs might be okay if they're built right. In Oregon, people would look at you funny if you built a house with a flat roof, and yet almost all our commercial buildings have flat roofs, so apparently it works out somehow.

(Oregon has one semi-famous flat-roofed house that I'm aware of, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I suspect FLW hadn't actually ever been to Oregon: it looked like a house that belongs in Arizona or California. Anyways, the eventual owner of the land the house is built on wanted to tear it down and build a mansion, and after much protests they allowed some people to come in and take the house apart and reassemble it near Salem. After putting it back together, they found some of the original contractors who had built the house originally. Supposedly they took a tour of the house and declared that it must have been properly reassembled, because the roof leaks in all the same places.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_House_(Silverton,_Orego...

> I wonder if the pool can tolerate freezing solid in the winter, or if it cracks the concrete?

A lot of people have inground pools here in Quebec. AFAIK it's just a matter of removing some of the water before it freezes, to minimize the effects of expansion. It does tend to generate small cracks, but nothing that can't be patched over with annual maintenance.

It's also weirdly not mentioned in the article - the lack of any of this type of feedback, especially considering it's about building a home in the Canadian woods.

(Love your username, btw)

Not defending the other design choices, but there are places in snowy mountain areas where (almost) flat roofs are common [0].

[0] https://www.davos.ch/en/information/portrait-image/storybook...

Seems like the flat roofs in Davos were a conscious decision to safeguard against avalanches.

From the link: >" In order to guard against dangerous avalanches in snow-covered Davos, the houses were covered with flat roofs."

I wish they had detailed how flat roofs guards against an avalanche? What is the logic/physics at work there?

roof avalanches, presumably

https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/2021/04/04/spring-melt-me...

There are a lot of people willing to take an idiot's money.

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