Buttress

Rules that use the word

Articulate brick walls with buttresses and recesses. Break the long faces of brick walls with regularly spaced shallow buttresses (or recesses), so that light and shadow give scale and rhythm to a material without mouldings.

Buttress the dome where the semidomes cannot. Where no semidome takes the thrust of the dome, on the north and south, carry it across the aisles to massive buttress piers that rise above the roofs, and fill the great arches with thin walls pierced by windows.

Concentrate the loads; fill the rest with glass. Gather the weight and thrust of the vaults onto a few points by ribs, carry them down piers and out across the aisles by flying buttresses to external buttress piers, and the wall between the supports carries almost nothing, so it can be opened into windows.

The flying buttress. Carry the outward thrust of a high vault across the aisle roof by a half-arch of stone (the flyer) that leans against the clerestory wall at the level of the vault’s haunches and springs from a massive buttress pier outside the aisle, which takes the thrust down to the ground.

The pinnacle is a weight. Load the top of a buttress pier with a heavy pinnacle: the added weight steepens the resultant of the flyer’s thrust and the pier’s own weight, keeping it well inside the base of the pier.

The width of the choir is the measure of all. Proportion every member of a vaulted choir from its clear width: the wall a fixed fraction of the width (a tenth, as the rule is usually read), and buttresses, window jambs, mullions and ribs as simple multiples or fractions of the wall.

Where it appears in the book

In the chapters Walls and Openings, The Arch, Vaults, Domes, Frame and Skin, The Ancient World, Byzantium and the Early Church, Romanesque and Gothic.

A feature of Mesopotamian, Gothic, Gothic Revival architecture.

Nearby in the glossary

Broken pediment · Brutalism · Bungalow · Buttery · Cai · Callimachus · Cantilever · Capital