Glossary · O
Ogee
Also called ogee arch
An arch or moulding of a double, S-shaped curve: convex below, concave above, rising to a point. Typical of fourteenth-century Gothic.
See also: Curvilinear tracery
Rules that use the word
How the pointed arches are drawn. Draw a pointed arch from two centres on the springing line. With the centres at the springings, the arch is equilateral; with centres beyond them, a lancet; with centres between them, a drop arch. Late Gothic added arches of four centres and the reversed curve of the ogee.
Tiers of kokoshniki. Mount from the walls to the drum in stepped tiers of decorative gables with pointed ogee heads, the kokoshniki, each tier set back and narrower than the one below, so that the body of the church rises into its domes in a pyramid of arches.
Plate, geometric, curvilinear, perpendicular. Date a Gothic window by its tracery: openings pierced through a plate (twelfth century); geometric bar tracery of circles and foils (thirteenth); flowing curvilinear tracery of ogees and daggers (fourteenth); and, in England, perpendicular panel tracery with mullions running straight up into the arch (late fourteenth to sixteenth).
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters The Arch, Romanesque and Gothic.
A feature of Russian architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Noyane · Nymphaeum · Obelisk · Oculus · Ondol · Onion dome · Open plan · Optical refinements