Arcade

Rules that use the word

Every arch is first built on a frame. An arch cannot support itself until it is complete. Build it on a timber centring shaped to the intrados, strike the centring only when the keystone is set and the mortar has taken, and reuse it from bay to bay, which is one reason to keep the spans of an arcade equal.

Make the end piers of an arcade the strongest. In a row of arches the thrusts of neighbouring arches cancel over each intermediate pier, which may therefore be slender; at the ends of the row nothing balances them, so the outermost piers must be made wider or buttressed.

Arcade, triforium, clerestory. Divide the elevation of the nave into three storeys: a tall arcade opening into the aisles, a low triforium passage in the thickness of the wall against the aisle roof, and a clerestory of large windows reaching up into the vault.

The hypostyle grows by addition. Make the prayer hall of identical bays of columns and arcades, so that it can be enlarged by adding aisles or bays without changing its character.

The bay as a cube. Make each bay of an arcade as wide as its columns are high and as deep as it is wide, so that the loggia is a row of equal cubes of space.

Strong and weak supports alternate. Where one nave vault spans two bays of the arcade, give the principal piers, which receive the vault, a heavier compound section with shafts running up the wall, and make the intermediate supports lighter: columns or simpler piers.

Where it appears in the book

In the chapters The Arch, Vaults, Proportion and Number, Columns in Company, The Classical World, Byzantium and the Early Church, Romanesque and Gothic, The Islamic World.

A feature of Ancient Roman, Early Christian, Early Islamic (Umayyad and Abbasid), Moorish (Western Islamic), Romanesque, Gothic architecture.

Nearby in the glossary

Aqueduct · Arabesque · Araeostyle · Arboretum · Arch brace · Architrave · Arithmetic mean · Arris