Nave

Rules that use the word

The two-storey church front. Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.

Light the nave from above the aisles. Raise the central nave above the lean-to roofs of the aisles and pierce the upper walls with a row of windows, the clerestory, so that the middle of a wide hall is lit from high on both sides.

Span the nave in timber. Cover a wide nave with triangulated timber trusses rather than a vault: their tie-beams take the outward thrust, so the walls need only carry weight and may stand on slender columns.

From the atrium to the apse. Order the church as a single path: a colonnaded atrium, a narthex, the long nave drawn toward the altar, and the apse framed by a triumphal arch at the end of the axis.

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.

Ad quadratum: a section as high as it is wide. Proportion the cross-section of a church from the square: let the total height to the crown of the nave vault equal the total width, and take the heights of the aisles and the springing of the vaults at whole divisions of that square.

Where it appears in the book

In the chapters Walls and Openings, Vaults, Domes, Frame and Skin, The Classical World, Byzantium and the Early Church, Romanesque and Gothic, South and Southeast Asia.

A feature of Early Christian, Romanesque, Gothic architecture.

Nearby in the glossary

Mutule · Naga balustrade · Naos · Narthex · Necking · Newel · Niche · Nosing