Glossary · P
Pediment
The low triangular gable at the end of a pitched roof, framed by the horizontal cornice below and the raking cornices above; the triangle within is the tympanum.
See also: Tympanum, Acroterion
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.
A pediment within a pediment. Mark the main door by setting a segmental pediment inside a larger triangular one, or by breaking the pediment open to hold a cartouche or statue.
Building from the pattern book. Take the plan, the orders and the details from the builders’ pattern books, simplified for timber and for the carpenter: a symmetrical front, a central hall and stair with rooms either side, a doorway under a pediment or fanlight, and mouldings drawn to be made with the plane.
The primitive hut. Judge every building against the first shelter: four trees for columns, branches laid across them for the entablature, and a pitched roof whose end makes the pediment. These three are the essential parts; all else is added.
Licences to avoid. Avoid the ornaments that have no model in the hut: broken or curved pediments, pediments on the long side of a roof, orders piled storey upon storey on a church front, arches carried on columns, and twisted or cabled shafts.
The height of the pediment. Divide the whole front of the cornice into nine parts; give one of them to the height of the tympanum, measured at its centre.
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters The Roof, The Temple, The Classical World, Renaissance and Baroque, Enlightenment and Revival, The Contemporary.
A feature of Ancient Greek, Mannerism, Palladian, Baroque, Neoclassical, Beaux-Arts, Postmodernism architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Passive solar design · Patte d’oie · Pattern language · Pedestal · Pendentive · Pergola · Peripteral · Peristyle