Flute

Also called fluting

One of the vertical channels cut into a column shaft: twenty shallow flutes meeting in sharp arrises in the Doric; twenty-four deeper flutes separated by fillets in the Ionic and Corinthian.

Rules that use the word

The fluted shaft before the Greeks. Cut a shaft with sixteen shallow flutes or facets, give it a square abacus and a low round base: the “proto-Doric” column of the Middle Kingdom rock tombs at Beni Hasan.

Where it appears in the book

In the chapters The Anatomy of an Order, The Ionic Order.

Nearby in the glossary

Fillet · Finial · Five points · Flemish bond · Flying buttress · Foil · Folly · Form-finding