Half-hipped roof

What a half-hipped roof is

A half-hipped roof, hankirizuma in Japanese, is a gabled roof in which only the top of each gable is clipped back to form a small hip. Records also call it hankirizuma-zukuri. The lower part of the gable remains a vertical wall as in an ordinary gable, and only the upper part becomes a short sloping roof face, so the outline of the gable end approaches a trapezoid.

It differs from neighbouring forms in the treatment of the gable. A plain gabled roof has no roof face at the ends and shows a triangular wall, and a hipped roof carries a large sloping face right down each end. A hip-and-gable roof is hipped below with a gable above, the reverse arrangement. A half-hipped roof is essentially a gable with only its peak clipped.

In Japan it was used chiefly on modern Western-style buildings and houses, dormitories and company housing. It follows a roof shape seen on European houses, and it is sometimes combined with dormer windows projecting from the roof to create a Western appearance.

Reading the records and the building

Records state that the roof is half-hipped. The family dormitory of Yamamoto Rock Machine, formerly Yamamoto Ironworks, in Shobara, Hiroshima, a three-storey timber building of 1937, is recorded with a half-hipped roof and dormer windows giving a Western appearance. The single workers' dormitory on the same site also has a half-hipped roof over a plan 59 metres long, one company's welfare buildings unified by a single roof form.

On site, look at the gable end. If the top of the triangular wall is cut off level and a small sloping roof face sits above it, the roof is half-hipped, and the gable looks lower than a full gable because its top is flattened.