Vocabularium

Glossary

607 words of the builder’s art. Wherever a term appears underlined like this in the book, hover over it or tap it to read its meaning.

Abacus: The flat slab forming the top of a capital, on which the architrave rests. Square in the Tuscan, Doric and Ionic; concave-sided with clipped corners in the Corinthian and Composite. See Capital, Echinus.
Ablaq (voussoir striping, striped voussoirs): Masonry of alternating light and dark courses or voussoirs, used in Syria and Mamluk Egypt; by extension the striped voussoirs of Córdoba.
Abutment: The mass of masonry (pier, wall or buttress) that resists the thrust of an arch or vault. See Thrust, Buttress.
Acanthus: A Mediterranean plant with deeply lobed leaves, carved in two rows round the bell of the Corinthian and Composite capitals. See Corinthian, Callimachus.
Acroterion (acroteria, acroterium): A pedestal, statue or ornament set on the apex or the lower corners of a pediment. See Pediment.
Ad quadratum: Design by the square: proportions derived from a square and the squares inscribed in it by joining mid-points, giving the ratio 1 : √2. See Ad triangulum.
Ad triangulum: Design by the equilateral triangle: heights set at √3⁄2 of the width or its divisions, as proposed for Milan Cathedral in 1391. See Ad quadratum.
Adhishthana (adhiṣṭhāna): The moulded base of a South Indian temple.
Aedicule (aedicula, tabernacle frame): A framing of an opening or niche by two columns or pilasters carrying an entablature and pediment: a small temple front applied to a wall.
Agora (forum): The open public square of a Greek city, its political and commercial centre, bordered by stoas and public buildings; the Roman equivalent is the forum. See Stoa, Basilica.
Aisle (side aisle): A lower passage running alongside the nave of a basilica or church, separated from it by a colonnade or arcade. Large basilicas such as Old St Peter’s had two aisles on each side. See Nave, Basilica.
Alae (ala): The “wings” of a Roman atrium: two recesses opening off its far end on either side, where the images of ancestors were displayed. See Atrium, Tablinum.
Alfarda (alfardas): The sloping balustrade that flanks the stairway of a Mesoamerican platform.
Alfiz (alfices): A rectangular frame, moulded or carved, enclosing an arch from the level of its springing; typical of Moorish architecture. See Horseshoe arch.
Allée (allées, allee, alley, contre-allée, counter-allée): A straight walk or ride in a formal garden, lined with clipped hedges or rows of trees. In the French garden its width is proportioned to its length; a walk under the trees beside it is a counter-allée (contre-allée). See Palissade, Patte d’oie.
Alternating supports (alternation): An arcade in which strong piers alternate with lighter piers or columns, usually because one vault covers two bays. See Sexpartite vault.
Amalaka (amalakas, āmalaka, bhumi-amalaka): The large ribbed stone disc that crowns a Nagara shikhara, named after the fruit of the āmalaka tree. See Kalasha.
Ambulatory: An aisle continued around the apse, allowing circulation behind the high altar. See Radiating chapels, Chevet.
Anathyrosis: The Greek technique of dressing only a narrow margin round the edge of a block’s joint face to a perfect fit, the centre being slightly hollowed, so that very fine joints could be made with less labour.
Anda: Sanskrit for “egg”: the hemispherical dome of a stupa. See Stupa.
Ang (cantilever arm, lever arm): A slanting lever-arm in a bracket set, running down and out to carry the eaves further while its tail rises inside the building to be held down under a purlin. Characteristic of Tang and Song bracketing. See Dougong.
Anta (antae): A pilaster-like thickening at the end of a side wall of a temple’s cella, with its own base and capital; columns set between two antae are said to be in antis. See In antis, Cella.
Antarala: The vestibule between the sanctum and the main hall of a Hindu temple.
Anticlastic (saddle surface, synclastic): Curved in opposite directions along two axes, like a saddle; hyperbolic paraboloids and tensile membranes are anticlastic. Its opposite, curved the same way in both directions like a dome, is synclastic.
Apadana: The great audience hall of an Achaemenid Persian palace: a square hall filled with a grid of tall slender columns, with porticoes on three sides and towers at the corners.
Apophyge: The small concave curve by which the shaft of a column spreads outward to meet its base or its astragal. See Shaft.
Apron moulding (apron): The characteristic Maya terrace profile: a sloping wall topped by a projecting band that overhangs and then slopes back.
Apse (apsis, apses): A semicircular (sometimes polygonal) recess at the end of a hall or church, usually covered by a half-dome. In the Roman basilica it held the magistrate’s tribunal; in the church, the altar and the bishop’s throne. See Semidome, Basilica.
Aqueduct (aqueducts): A conduit carrying water by gravity from a source to a city, in channels cut in the ground, tunnels through hills and bridges of arches across valleys. Roman aqueducts fell at gradients of a fraction of a per cent. See Specus.
Arabesque (arabesques): Ornament of continuous, rhythmically branching and curling plant stems and leaves, extended without end over a surface. See Girih.
Araeostyle: Vitruvius’s widest intercolumniation, more than three diameters, too wide for stone architraves; timber beams must be used. See Intercolumniation.
Arboretum (arboreta, pinetum, pineta): A collection of living trees and shrubs planted for study and display, each labelled and given room to grow; the Derby Arboretum (1840), designed by J. C. Loudon, was the first public one. See Gardenesque.
Arcade (arcades): A row of arches carried on piers or columns; in a church, the arches between the nave and the aisles. See Blind arcade, Triforium.
Arch brace (arch-braced, arch braces): A curved brace from a post or wall up to a collar or tie beam, so that a pair of them forms an arch under the truss; common in the open roofs of medieval halls. See Collar, Hammerbeam.
Architrave (epistyle): The lowest of the three parts of the entablature: the beam that spans from column to column. In the Ionic and Corinthian it is divided into two or three stepped bands called fasciae. See Entablature, Fascia.
Arithmetic mean: The number halfway between two others: (a + b)/2. For 6 and 12 it is 9. See Geometric mean, Harmonic mean.
Arris: The sharp edge where two surfaces meet, in particular the knife-edge between two Doric flutes. See Flute.
Ashlar (ashlar masonry): Masonry of stones cut square and laid in regular courses with fine joints. See Cyclopean masonry.
Astragal (bead): A small convex moulding of semicircular section, like a bead; it rings the top of a column shaft just below the capital. See Torus, Moulding.
Atrium (atria, atriums): In a Roman house, the central hall open to the sky through the compluvium, with the impluvium below. In an Early Christian church, the colonnaded forecourt in front of the narthex, often with a fountain. See Compluvium, Impluvium, Narthex, Domus.
Attic (attic storey): A storey or wall above the main cornice of a façade, as on a Roman triumphal arch, where it carries the dedicatory inscription. Not to be confused with the Attic base of a column. See Triumphal arch.
Attic base: The most common base of the richer orders: a square plinth, a large lower torus, a scotia between two fillets, and a smaller upper torus. Vitruvius names it after Athens. See Base, Torus, Scotia.
Attractor (attractor point, attractors): In parametric design, a point or curve whose distance from each element of a design controls one of its properties, such as size, rotation or opening.
Avlu (forecourt): The forecourt of an Ottoman mosque, surrounded by a domed portico, with an ablution fountain at its centre. See Şadırvan.
Axis (axes, axial): An imaginary line about which the parts of a building or city are arranged, usually symmetrically; the organising device of classical, Baroque and Beaux-Arts planning.
Baluster (balusters): A short post or pillar, usually turned in a vase or pear shape, one of a row supporting a rail in a balustrade.
Balustrade: A row of balusters carrying a rail or coping, used as a parapet on roofs, terraces, stairs and balconies. See Baluster.
Baptistery (baptistry): A separate building, or a room, for baptism, usually centrally planned around a font, often octagonal, the number eight standing for resurrection and new life. See Martyrium.
Bar tracery: Tracery formed of slender moulded bars that continue the mullions into circles, foils and sub-arches, so that the window is mostly glass; introduced at Reims around 1211. See Geometric tracery, Plate tracery.
Barchessa (barchesse): In the Venetian villa, one of the long arcaded farm wings extending from the main house, housing stores, stables and workshops. See Villa.
Bargeboard (bargeboards, vergeboard): A board fixed along the sloping edge of a gable, covering the ends of the roof timbers; often carved or fretted in the Gothic and Victorian house. See Gable.
Barrel vault (tunnel vault, barrel): A vault of continuous semicircular (or pointed) section, like a tunnel; it needs continuous support along both sides. See Groin vault, Transverse arch.
Base: The lowest part of a column, between the shaft and the pedestal or floor. The Greek Doric has none. See Attic base, Plinth.
Basilica: A long hall divided by rows of columns or piers into a tall central nave and lower side aisles, usually with an apse at one end. In Rome it was the civic hall of the forum, used for business and the law courts; from the fourth century it became the standard form of the Christian church. See Nave, Aisle, Apse, Clerestory.
Bastion (bastions, angle bastion): An angled projection from the wall of a fortification, shaped so that fire from its flanks can sweep the faces of neighbouring bastions and the curtain between them. See Trace italienne.
Batter (battered, battered wall): The inward slope of a wall face as it rises, so that the wall is thicker at the foot than at the top. Universal in Egyptian pylons and mastabas, in Mesopotamian terraces and in Inca walls. See Talud, Pylon.
Bay (bays): One of the repeated vertical divisions of a building, marked by piers, shafts or buttresses and by the units of its vault. See Respond.
Bay window (bay windows, canted bay): A window projecting from the face of a wall, rising from the ground, square, canted (with angled sides) or curved; the Victorian house’s favourite way of bringing light and a view into the front room. See Oriel.
Beaux-Arts (École des Beaux-Arts): The teaching and style of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, dominant internationally from about 1830 to 1930: axial, symmetrical plans, rich classical elevations and the discipline of the parti.
Bedding out (bedding, bedding plants, ribbon border, ribbon bedding): The Victorian practice of raising tender plants under glass and planting them out in early summer, massed in beds in blocks, ribbons or patterns of a few strong colours, then lifting them in autumn. A ribbon border is a long bed planted in parallel stripes. See Carpet bedding.
Bekleidung (dressing, principle of dressing): Semper’s “dressing” or cladding: the principle that the visible surface of a wall descends from woven hangings and is by nature a covering, not the structure itself.
Belt (belts, perimeter belt): In the English landscape park, a broad band of woodland planted round the boundary to hide it and the land beyond, usually with a drive or ride inside it from which the park is seen. See Clump, Ha-ha.
Béton brut (beton brut): Raw concrete left as it comes from the formwork, showing the marks of the boards and joints (French: raw concrete). See Brutalism.
Bhumi (bhumis): A storey of a Nagara shikhara, usually marked at the corners by a small bhumi-amalaka.
BIM (Building Information Modelling, Building Information Modeling): Building Information Modelling: a shared digital model of a building containing its geometry and the data of every component, used for design, construction and operation.
Bipedalis (bipedales): A large square Roman tile two Roman feet (about 59 cm) on a side, used for bonding courses through brick-faced walls and for the floors of hypocausts. See Opus testaceum.
Blind arcade (blind arcading, arcading): A row of arches applied to the surface of a wall, with no openings. See Lombard band.
Bosquet (bosquets): A block of trees in a formal garden, planted in a grid or quincunx and enclosed by clipped hedges, cut through by walks and often holding a hidden green room, fountain or theatre. See Salle de verdure, Palissade.
Boss (bosses, keystone of a vault): A carved block of stone at the intersection of ribs in a vault, often sculpted with foliage or figures. See Rib.
Brahmasthana (Brahmasthāna, brahmasthan): The central squares of the Vastu Purusha Mandala, the place of Brahmā, over which the sanctum of a temple is placed.
Bressumer (breastsummer): The beam along the ends of the jettied joists of a timber-framed building, on which the wall frame of the storey above stands; often moulded or carved. See Jetty.
Brise-soleil (brise-soleils, sun-breaker): A fixed sun-breaker of fins, louvres or deep cells in front of a façade, shading the glass; much used by Le Corbusier.
Broderie (parterre de broderie, parterres de broderie, embroidered parterre, embroidery): Embroidery: the pattern of a parterre de broderie, scrolls and arabesques of dwarf box laid out like needlework on a ground of coloured gravel, sand, brick dust or coal, designed to be seen from the windows above. See Parterre.
Broken pediment (open pediment): A pediment whose sloping sides stop short of the apex, leaving a gap; used in Baroque architecture and furniture and revived by postmodernists.
Brutalism (New Brutalism): Architecture of the 1950s–70s that exhibits its structure and materials (above all raw concrete) with massive, sculptural directness.
Bungalow (bungalows): A low house of one storey, or one and a half, with a broad roof and usually a veranda or porch; from the Hindi bangla, a house in the Bengal manner, by way of British India, and the commonest American house of the early twentieth century. See Porch.
Buttery: The room where drink was kept and served, off the screens passage at the lower end of the hall; the name comes from the butts, or casks, not from butter. See Pantry, Screens passage.
Buttress (buttresses, buttress pier, culée): A mass of masonry built against or beside a wall to resist the thrust of a vault or roof; a buttress pier (French culée) receives the flyers. See Flying buttress, Abutment.
Cai (ts’ai): The module of the Yingzao fashi: the section of a standard timber (a bracket arm), 15 fen high and 10 fen wide, in eight grades from 9 × 6 cun to 4½ × 3 cun. See Fen, Zhi, Zucai.
Callimachus: The Greek sculptor who, according to Vitruvius, invented the Corinthian capital after seeing acanthus growing round a basket on a girl’s tomb. See Corinthian.
Cantilever (cantilevers, cantilevered): A beam, slab or truss supported at one end only, projecting beyond its support and held by the moment at the fixed end.
Capital: The head of a column, which gathers the load of the entablature and passes it to the shaft. Each order has its own capital, the easiest way to tell the orders apart. See Abacus, Echinus, Volute.
Capstone: The stone that closes the top of a corbelled vault or dome, or the great slab laid over the chamber of a dolmen. See Corbelled vault, Dolmen.
Carpet bedding (carpet bed, carpet beds): A form of Victorian bedding from the late 1860s in which low foliage and succulent plants, clipped to an even height, form flat, detailed patterns like a carpet, crests or lettering. See Bedding out.
Cartouche (cartouches): An ornamental panel or shield with scrolled, curling edges, often framing an inscription or coat of arms.
Casement (casements, casement window): A window hinged at the side to open like a door, the usual English window before the sash and again in the Arts and Crafts house. See Sash window, Leaded light.
Catena d’acqua (water chain, catena): A water chain: a stepped stone channel down a slope, with scrolled sides that break the water into ripples and small falls, as at the Villa Lante and Caprarola. See Chadar, Rill.
Catenary (catenary arch, catenaries): The curve of a chain or cable hanging freely under its own weight (y = a·cosh(x/a)); turned upside down, it is the ideal shape for an arch carrying its own weight. See Thrust line.
Cavea (cunei, cuneus, auditorium): The seating of a Greek or Roman theatre or amphitheatre, rising in tiers, divided by stairs into wedges (cunei) and by horizontal cross-aisles (praecinctiones). See Orchestra, Praecinctio.
Cavetto: A concave moulding of a quarter-circle section. See Moulding.
Cavetto cornice (gorge, Egyptian gorge, cavetto, gorge cornice): The crowning moulding of Egyptian walls: a deep concave quarter-round (the gorge) that flares outward under a flat top band, set above a torus roll. It is thought to recall the tops of reed or palm-rib walls bent outward by their own weight. See Torus moulding.
Cejiao (ce jiao, anssollim, inward lean): The inward inclination of the outer columns of a Chinese hall (1/100 of their height on the front and back, 8/1000 on the ends), which stiffens the frame. Korean anssollim. See Shengqi.
Cella (naos): The enclosed inner room of a temple that housed the cult statue. Also called the naos. See Pronaos, Peristyle.
Centring (centering): The temporary timber framework on which an arch or vault is built and which is struck (removed) once the ring is closed. See Voussoir.
Chadar (chadars, chador): In the Mughal garden, a sloping stone chute down which water falls from one terrace to the next, its surface carved in ridges, scales or zigzags to make the water sparkle; from the Persian for a sheet or shawl. See Chini khana, Charbagh.
Chaitya (chaityas, chaitya hall): A Buddhist sanctuary; in architecture, an apsidal hall, often rock-cut, with a stupa at the end of a vaulted nave. See Vihara, Gavaksha.
Charbagh (char bagh, chahar bagh, charbaghs): Persian for “four gardens”: a walled garden divided into four quarters by raised walks and water channels on the two axes.
Chattra (chattras, chhatra, chattravali): A parasol of stone on the mast (yashti) of a stupa; its number, often three, marks honour. See Yashti.
Chevet: The whole eastern end of a French church: apse, ambulatory and radiating chapels, seen as one composition. See Ambulatory.
Chhajja (chajja): A deep sloping eave or cornice on brackets, throwing a band of shadow; characteristic of Indian architecture.
Chhatri (chhatris, chattri): Hindi for “umbrella”: a small open pavilion with a dome on columns, used to crown roofs, gateways and minarets in Rajput and Mughal architecture. See Chhajja.
Chicago window: A wide window of three parts (a large fixed central pane between two narrow opening sashes), typical of Chicago office buildings of the 1890s.
Chigi (chigi (finials)): The forked finials at the gable ends of a Shintō shrine: the bargeboards continued upward past the ridge so that they cross. At Ise’s Inner Shrine their tips are cut horizontally. See Katsuogi, Shinmei-zukuri.
Chini khana (chini-khana): In the Mughal garden, a wall of small arched niches behind a waterfall, in which lamps were set at night and vases of flowers by day, to be seen through the falling water. See Chadar.
Chiwen (chiwei, zhengwen, ridge ornament): The large ornament at each end of the main ridge of a Chinese hall: in the Tang an owl’s tail (chiwei), later a dragon-headed fish whose jaws swallow the ridge; believed to protect the building from fire. See Ridge.
Choir (quire, chancel): The part of the church east of the crossing where the clergy sing the office; often used of the whole eastern arm. See Chevet, Apse.
Chuandou (chuan dou, column-and-tie): The column-and-tie frame of southern China: a column rises under every purlin and tie-beams (chuan) are threaded through the columns. See Tailiang.
Clapboard (clapboards, clapboarding, weatherboard, weatherboarding): Long, thin boards laid horizontally on a timber frame, each overlapping the one below to shed rain, usually painted; the cladding of the New England house. Called weatherboarding in England. See Shingle.
Claude glass (Claude glasses): A small, slightly convex mirror of tinted glass, used by eighteenth-century travellers to view a landscape with their backs to it, reduced and toned like a painting by Claude Lorrain. See Picturesque.
Clerestory (clerestorey): An upper zone of wall pierced with windows that rises above lower roofs on either side, lighting the middle of a wide hall. Egyptian hypostyles used stone grilles; Christian basilicas inherited the idea. See Hypostyle.
Cloister vault (domical vault (on a square)): A vault rising from all four walls of a room, its curved cells meeting in valleys along the diagonals; the intersection rather than the union of two barrels. See Groin vault.
Close studding (close-studding, close-studded): Timber framing with the upright studs set close together, barely their own width apart, a display of costly oak in Tudor England. See Half-timbering, Wattle and daub.
Clump (clumps): A small group of trees standing in open ground in a landscape park, planted to break the view, crown a rise or frame a prospect; often fenced while young. Brown used them freely, and Price and Repton criticised the habit. See Belt.
Coffer (coffers, coffering, lacunar, lacunaria): A sunken panel, square or polygonal, set into a ceiling, vault or dome, reducing its weight and giving it a regular pattern. The Pantheon’s dome has five rings of 28 coffers. See Dome.
Collar (collar beam): A horizontal timber tying a pair of rafters together part way up the roof, above the wall plates; a roof without tie beams, its trusses held by collars and braces, leaves the room below open to the ridge. See Arch brace, Truss.
Column: A vertical support, normally circular in section, consisting of base, shaft and capital. In classical architecture its lower diameter is the module from which the whole order is proportioned. See Order, Module.
Commensurability (commensurable, symmetria): The property of dimensions that can all be measured by a common unit, so that they stand in whole-number ratios; Vitruvius’s symmetria.
Compluvium: The rectangular opening in the roof of a Roman atrium, toward which the roof sloped inward; Vitruvius makes it a quarter to a third of the atrium’s width. See Impluvium, Atrium.
Composite: The fifth and richest order, a Roman combination of the Corinthian’s acanthus bell with the large volutes of the Ionic set diagonally at the corners. See Order.
Compound pier (clustered pier, compound piers, pilier cantonné): A pier with shafts or half-columns attached to its faces, each carrying one of the arches or ribs above. See Respond.
Concinnitas: Alberti’s term for beauty: the harmony of number, outline and position among all the parts of a building, such that nothing could be added or removed except for the worse.
Conservatory (conservatories, glasshouse, glasshouses, palm house, hothouse): A glass building for growing or displaying tender plants, often joined to a house. The great conservatories and palm houses of the nineteenth century, framed in iron, made the techniques of the Crystal Palace. See Orangery, Ridge-and-furrow.
Corbel (corbelling, corbelled): A stone projecting from a wall to support something above it; in a corbelled vault or dome, each course of stone projects a little beyond the one below. See Corbelled vault.
Corbelled dome (beehive dome): A dome built of horizontal rings of stone, each ring stepping inward over the one below; the rings are held by their own hoop compression as well as by weight behind them. The tholos tombs of Mycenae are the great examples. See Tholos tomb.
Corbelled vault (corbel vault, false vault, false arch, corbel arch, Maya arch): A roof made by stepping horizontal courses of stone inward from both walls until the gap can be closed by a capstone. Every stone stays horizontal and no thrust is produced, so it is not a true arch; it stands only while each half keeps its centre of gravity over its wall. See Corbel, Hearting.
Corinthian: The most slender of the three Greek orders, with a tall capital of acanthus leaves and small corner volutes. See Acanthus, Callimachus.
Cornice: The uppermost, projecting part of the entablature. Its overhanging corona throws rainwater clear of the wall below; its mouldings frame the top of the building. See Entablature, Corona.
Corona: The vertical, strongly projecting face of a cornice, undercut below with a drip so that water falls clear. See Cornice.
Cortile (cortili): The internal courtyard of an Italian palazzo, usually surrounded by arcades.
Cottage orné (cottages ornés, cottage ornée): A small rustic house of the Picturesque, with a thatched roof, rough timber verandas and Gothic or irregular windows, built as a lodge, retreat or ornament in a park. See Picturesque.
Crepidoma: The stepped platform of a Greek temple, normally three steps; its top step is the stylobate. See Stylobate.
Crocket (crockets): A carved projecting leaf or bud set at intervals along the sloping edges of spires, pinnacles and gables. See Finial.
Cross-in-square (cross in square, inscribed cross, quincunx church): The standard middle Byzantine church plan: a square naos divided into nine bays, the central bay domed on four columns or piers, the four arms barrel-vaulted to form a cross, and the four corner bays lower. See Pendentive, Drum.
Crossing: The space where nave, choir and transepts meet, often marked by a tower, lantern or spire. See Transept.
Crown post (crown-post): In a medieval roof, a post standing on the middle of a tie beam to carry a collar purlin running the length of the roof, with braces up to it and to the collars. See Collar, Purlin.
Cruck (crucks, cruck frame): One of a pair of large curved timbers rising from near the ground to meet at the ridge, carrying the roof and often the walls of a medieval building; a cruck frame is a row of such pairs. See Truss.
Cupola: A small dome, or the dome itself seen from inside; in English also a small domed turret on a roof.
Curtain wall: A non-load-bearing outer wall, usually of glass and metal, hung from the edges of the floor slabs and carrying only its own weight and the wind. See Mullion, Spandrel panel.
Curvilinear tracery (flowing tracery, Flamboyant): Flowing tracery of ogees, daggers and mouchettes, of English Decorated (c. 1290–1370) and French Flamboyant. See Ogee.
Cushion capital (block capital, cushion capitals): A Romanesque capital shaped like a cube with its lower corners rounded off to meet the circular shaft. See Compound pier.
Cusp (cusps, cusped, cusping): The point where two foils meet in tracery, projecting inward. See Foil.
Cyclopean masonry (cyclopean): Walling of huge, roughly shaped blocks with small stones packed in the gaps, as at Tiryns and Mycenae, named because later Greeks thought only the giant Cyclopes could have lifted them. See Ashlar, Polygonal masonry.
Cyma recta (ogee, sima): An S-shaped moulding, concave below and convex above; the usual crowning moulding (sima) of a cornice. See Cyma reversa.
Cyma reversa (reverse ogee): An S-shaped moulding, convex below and concave above; also called a reverse ogee or Lesbian cymatium. See Cyma recta.
Dancheong: The painted polychrome decoration of the timber of Korean temples and palaces, in green, red, blue and white, protecting the wood and marking the building’s dignity. See Hanok.
Deconstructivism (Deconstruction, decon): The tendency of the 1980s–90s that fragmented, tilted and collided architectural forms, named by a MoMA exhibition in 1988.
Decorated shed (decorated sheds): A plain, conventional building whose meaning is carried by signs or ornament applied to it; advocated in Learning from Las Vegas (1972). See Duck.
Dentil (dentils): One of a row of small projecting blocks, like teeth, in the bed-moulding of Ionic, Corinthian and Composite cornices. See Cornice.
Diastyle: An intercolumniation of three diameters. See Intercolumniation.
Die (dado): The plain middle block of a pedestal, between its base and cap. Also called the dado. See Pedestal.
Diminution: The narrowing of a column shaft from bottom to top. Vitruvius makes it smaller for taller columns. See Entasis.
Dipteral: A temple surrounded by a double row of columns. See Peripteral.
Dolmen (dolmens, portal tomb, cromlech): A megalithic tomb chamber of upright slabs (orthostats) roofed by one or more capstones, originally buried under a mound of earth or stones. See Orthostat, Capstone.
Dom-ino (Dom-ino frame, Domino): Le Corbusier’s diagram of 1914 for a standard concrete skeleton: flat slabs on a few columns linked by a stair, to be filled in freely.
Dome (domes, cupola): A vault of circular or polygonal plan, generated by rotating an arch about its vertical axis. It is in compression along its meridians but, if hemispherical, in tension round its lower rings, which is why domes crack along their meridians and need restraint at the haunches. See Drum, Pendentive, Oculus, Lantern, Onion dome.
Domus: The Roman town house of a well-to-do family, arranged along an axis from the entrance passage (fauces) through the atrium and tablinum to the peristyle garden. See Atrium, Tablinum, Fauces, Insula.
Doric: The oldest and sturdiest of the Greek orders, with a plain cushion capital and a frieze of triglyphs and metopes; the Greek version has no base. See Triglyph, Metope.
Dormer (dormers, dormer window): A window standing up out of a sloping roof, with its own small roof, to light a room in the roof space. See Gambrel, Mansard roof.
Dou (lu dou, ludou, bearing block): A bearing block in a bracket set, square or rectangular, with a flat top slotted to receive the arms, a short vertical “waist” and a concave, tapering foot. The largest, on the column head, is the lu dou. See Dougong.
Double coding: Charles Jencks’s definition of Post-Modern architecture: speaking both to architects, in modern technique, and to the public, in familiar signs.
Double dome (double domes, double-shell dome): A dome of two shells, a lower inner one proportioned to the room and a higher outer one proportioned to the skyline, with a void between. See Drum.
Double pile (double-pile): A house two rooms deep throughout, usually with a central hall and stair between the front rooms and the back; the standard plan of the Georgian house. See Sash window.
Double-jamb doorway (double jamb): An Inca doorway whose trapezoidal opening is framed by a second, larger recessed trapezoid, marking the entrance to a building or precinct of high rank.
Dougong (tou-kung, bracket set, bracket sets, puzuo, dougongs): A bracket set: a cluster of bearing blocks (dou) and arms (gong), sometimes with slanting levers (ang), stacked on a column head or between columns to carry the eaves and gather the roof load onto the columns. Called puzuo in the Song, tokyō or kumimono in Japan, gongpo in Korea. See Dou, Gong, Ang, Cai.
Doukou: The module of Qing official architecture (1734): the width of the slot in the great bearing block, in eleven grades. See Cai.
Drift (drifts): In Gertrude Jekyll’s planting, a long, narrow group of one kind of plant laid lengthways along a border and overlapping its neighbours, so that colours blend and gaps left by plants that have finished flowering are small. See Herbaceous border.
Dromos: The open, walled passage leading into a Mycenaean chamber or tholos tomb, filled in with earth after each burial. See Tholos tomb, Stomion.
Drum (tholobate, drums): A cylindrical or polygonal wall on which a dome is raised above the roofs, usually pierced by windows. Byzantine drums are low; Russian drums are tall and slender; Renaissance domes stand on high drums ringed by columns. See Dome, Onion dome.
Duck (ducks): In Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s terms, a building whose whole form is a symbol of its purpose, like the duck-shaped poultry shop on Long Island. See Decorated shed.
Eaves (eave): The lower edge of a roof, projecting beyond the wall to throw rain clear. East Asian eaves are exceptionally deep, carried on bracket sets and flying rafters and often lifted at the corners. See Rafter, Dougong.
Echinus: The convex, cushion-like moulding under the abacus of a Doric capital (and carved with egg-and-dart under the Ionic volutes). See Abacus, Capital.
Egg-and-dart: A carved ornament of alternating egg shapes and arrow-heads, run along an ovolo moulding. See Ovolo.
Emplekton (diatonos, diatonoi, through-stone): The Greek method of building thick walls with the stones of the two faces bonded through the thickness by headers and through-stones (diatonoi), rather than as two skins with a loose filling. See Isodomum, Header.
Enfilade: A suite of rooms whose doorways are aligned on one axis, so that a view runs through them all; typical of Baroque palaces. See Axis.
Engawa: The narrow wooden veranda along the outside of a Japanese house, between the rooms and the garden, under the eaves. See Shoji.
English bond: Brickwork in which whole courses of headers alternate with whole courses of stretchers: the strongest of the common bonds. See Flemish bond, Header, Stretcher.
Entablature: Everything above the columns and below the roof: the architrave, frieze and cornice together. See Architrave, Frieze, Cornice.
Entasis: The slight convex swelling given to a column shaft so that it does not look pinched or concave. Vignola’s method keeps the lower third straight and curves the rest. See Diminution.
Equilateral arch: A pointed arch whose two arcs have radii equal to the span, so that the apex and the springings form an equilateral triangle. See Pointed arch.
Espalier (espaliers, espaliered, fan-trained): A fruit tree or shrub trained flat against a wall or on a frame of wires or laths, its branches tied in horizontal tiers or fans; also the frame itself. See Pleaching, Treillage.
Esquisse (esquisses): The rapid preliminary sketch of a design made by a Beaux-Arts student, often in a twelve-hour session en loge, which fixed the parti.
Eustyle: Vitruvius’s preferred intercolumniation: two and a quarter diameters, with the middle opening widened to three. See Intercolumniation.
Exedra (exedrae): A semicircular or rectangular recess opening off a larger space, often with seats; in Roman baths and fora a large apsidal hall; in Hagia Sophia the half-domed niches opening from the semidomes. See Semidome, Apse.
Extrados: The outer, upper curve of an arch ring. See Intrados.
Eye-catcher (eye-catchers, eyecatcher): A building or object, such as a temple, sham ruin, obelisk or castellated wall, placed on a distant rise of a landscape garden to close a view and draw the eye. See Folly.
Fan vault (fan vaults, fan vaulting, conoid): An English late-Gothic vault of inverted half-cones (conoids) whose ribs all have the same curve, decorated as panel tracery, with flat spandrels between. See Perpendicular tracery.
Fanlight (fanlights, transom light): A window over a door, semicircular or semi-elliptical with glazing bars radiating like a fan, lighting the hall behind; characteristic of the later Georgian and Federal house. See Sash window.
Fascia (fasciae): A flat horizontal band; the architraves of the Ionic and Corinthian are made of two or three fasciae, each stepping slightly forward of the one below. See Architrave.
Fauces: The narrow entrance passage of a Roman house, leading from the street door to the atrium (literally “jaws”). See Atrium, Domus.
Fen: One fifteenth of the height of a cai: the unit in which every member of a Song building is dimensioned. Its absolute size depends on the grade of cai chosen, from 0.6 to 0.3 cun. See Cai.
Ferme ornée (fermes ornées, ornamented farm): An ornamented farm: an estate in which the working farm itself is laid out as a landscape garden, its fields bordered by walks and planted edges, as at Woburn Farm (Philip Southcote, from 1735) and the Leasowes (William Shenstone).
Fillet (listel): A narrow flat band used to separate and sharpen other mouldings; also the flat strip left between flutes in the Ionic and Corinthian. See Moulding.
Finial (finials): The ornament that crowns a spire, pinnacle or gable, often a cross of four leaves (a fleuron). See Crocket, Pinnacle.
Five points (five points of architecture): Le Corbusier’s five points of a new architecture (1926): pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon window and roof garden, all consequences of the concrete frame. See Pilotis, Dom-ino.
Flemish bond: Brickwork in which headers and stretchers alternate within every course, each header centred on the stretcher below. See English bond.
Flute (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. See Arris, Fillet.
Flying buttress (flying buttresses, flyer, flyers, arc-boutant): A half-arch of masonry that springs from a detached buttress pier and leans against the upper wall of the nave, carrying the thrust of the high vault across the aisle. See Buttress, Pinnacle, Thrust.
Foil (foils, trefoil, quatrefoil, cinquefoil, multifoil): A lobe formed by the cusping of a circle or arch: three make a trefoil, four a quatrefoil, five a cinquefoil, many a multifoil. See Cusp.
Folly (follies): A building in a garden or park made chiefly for effect, often useless or deliberately odd: a sham ruin, a tower, a hermitage. See Eye-catcher.
Form-finding (form finding, form-active): Deriving a structural form by physical or digital experiment (hanging chains, soap films, loaded nets) so that it carries its loads in pure tension or compression.
Four-centred arch (Tudor arch): A low, pointed arch struck from four centres, two on the springing line and two below it; the Tudor arch of English Perpendicular. See Perpendicular tracery.
Four-iwan plan (four iwan plan, four-iwan): A courtyard with an iwan in the middle of each side, used for mosques, madrasas and caravanserais in Iran and beyond from the 12th century. See Iwan.
Free façade (free facade): An outer wall that carries no floors, made possible by setting the columns back from the slab edge; it can be opened or glazed at will. See Curtain wall.
Free plan (plan libre): A plan in which partitions are placed independently of the structure, because columns rather than walls carry the floors. See Open plan.
Frequency (frequency (geodesic)): In a geodesic dome, the number of parts into which each edge of the original icosahedron is divided; higher frequencies give more, shorter struts and a rounder dome.
Frieze: The middle part of the entablature, between architrave and cornice. Plain or carved with a continuous relief in the Ionic and Corinthian; divided into triglyphs and metopes in the Doric. See Entablature, Triglyph.
Functionalism (functionalist): The doctrine that a building’s form should be derived from its function, structure and materials; summed up in the slogan “form follows function”.
Fusuma: An opaque sliding panel of paper on a wooden frame, often painted, dividing one room from another. See Shoji.
Gable (gables, gable roof, gable end): The triangular upper part of an end wall, closing the end of a two-slope roof; in classical architecture it becomes the pediment. See Hip, Xuanshan, Kirizuma.
Gablet (Wimperg, wimperg, gablets): A small gable, especially one on each face of a pinnacle; the German Wimperg also names the tall gable over a Gothic portal or window. See Pinnacle.
Gallery (tribune, galleries): In a church, an upper storey over the aisles opening onto the nave, also called a tribune; common in Romanesque and Early Gothic. See Triforium, Quadrant vault.
Gambrel (gambrel roof): A gable roof with two pitches on each side, the lower steeper: the typical barn roof of the Netherlands and North America. See Mansard.
Garbhagriha (garbha griha, garbhagṛha, sanctum): “Womb-house”: the small, dark sanctum of a Hindu temple that houses the image of the deity. See Shikhara, Vimana.
Gardenesque: J. C. Loudon’s term (1832) for a manner of planting in which each tree and shrub is set apart so that it grows to its full natural form and can be seen as a specimen, exotic kinds being preferred so that the garden is recognised as a work of art. See Arboretum, Picturesque.
Gargoyle (gargoyles): A projecting spout, usually carved as a grotesque creature, that throws rainwater from a gutter clear of the wall. See Flying buttress.
Gavaksha (kudu, chandrashala): The horseshoe-shaped window of the chaitya hall, which became a ubiquitous ornamental motif of Indian temples.
Geodesic dome (geodesic, geodesic domes): A dome framed with a network of triangles lying on great circles of a sphere, generated by subdividing the faces of an icosahedron; patented by Buckminster Fuller in 1954. See Frequency.
Geometric mean: The number that stands to the larger as the smaller stands to it: √(ab). For 6 and 12 it is about 8.49: irrational, and found by construction. See Arithmetic mean, Harmonic mean.
Geometric tracery: Bar tracery composed of circles, foils and pointed sub-arches, typical of the thirteenth century. See Curvilinear tracery.
Gerberette (gerberettes): A short cast-steel rocker bracket, pivoting on a column, that carries a floor girder at its inner end and is tied down at its outer end; used at the Centre Pompidou.
Giant order (colossal order): An order of columns or pilasters rising through two or more storeys, used to unify a façade; also called the colossal order. Michelangelo’s Capitoline palaces established it. See Pilaster.
Giardino segreto (giardini segreti, secret garden): The secret garden of the Italian villa: a small enclosed garden by the house, reserved for the owner, with flowers, herbs, fruit trees and a fountain. See Hortus conclusus.
Girih (girih tiles, strapwork): Persian for “knot”: geometric strapwork of interlacing bands forming star-and-polygon patterns; by extension the set of tiles from which such patterns can be built. See Arabesque.
Giwa (giwa tiles): Korean clay roof tiles, laid in alternating concave and convex courses on a bed of earth, with decorated end tiles at the eaves. See Hanok.
Going (tread, treads, run): The horizontal depth of a step measured from one nosing to the next (the tread less the overlap); Blondel’s rule relates it to the riser: 2 risers + going ≈ 63–65 cm. See Riser, Nosing.
Golden section (golden ratio, golden mean, divine proportion, φ, phi): The division of a line so that the whole is to the larger part as the larger is to the smaller; the ratio φ = (1 + √5)/2 ≈ 1.618. Also called the golden ratio, golden mean or divine proportion.
Gong (huagong, bracket arm): A bracket arm: a horizontal timber of one cai in section, its ends rounded underneath (juansha), carrying small blocks at each end. Outward-projecting arms are huagong (“flower arms”). See Dougong, Juansha.
Gopuram (gopurams, gopura): The gateway tower of a South Indian temple enclosure, tapering in many storeys and crowned by a barrel vault with finials. See Prakara.
Groin (groins): The curved arris formed where two vault surfaces intersect. See Groin vault.
Groin vault (cross vault): A vault formed by two barrel vaults intersecting at right angles; the sharp edges where they meet are the groins. See Groin, Rib vault.
Grotto (grottoes, grottos, grotta): An artificial cave in a garden, lined with tufa, shells, pebbles and coloured stones and often fitted with fountains, statues and water tricks. See Nymphaeum.
Guldasta (guldastas): A small ornamental pinnacle rising at the corners of a pishtaq or roof in Persian and Mughal architecture.
Guttae (gutta): Small drop-like cones under the regula beneath each triglyph and on the soffit of Doric mutules, perhaps the memory of wooden pegs. See Triglyph, Mutule.
Ha-ha (ha-has, haha, sunk fence, ah-ah, ah! ah!): A sunk fence: a ditch with a vertical retaining wall on the garden side and a sloping bank on the other, which keeps cattle out of a garden without interrupting the view; named, Walpole says, from the surprise of those who came upon it. See Belt.
Half-timbering (half-timbered, timber-framed, timber framing): Building with a frame of timber whose panels are filled with other materials, wattle and daub or brick, so that the timbers show on the face of the wall; and its imitation, in boards fixed over brick, in the revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Close studding, Wattle and daub.
Hammerbeam (hammerbeam roof, hammer-beam): A short beam projecting from the top of a wall, braced from below, carrying an arch brace and a post above it: a way of spanning a wide hall without a tie beam across it, as at Westminster Hall (1390s) and Hampton Court. See Arch brace.
Hanegi: A cantilever beam inside a Japanese hidden roof, pivoting on the column line to carry the deep eaves. See Noyane.
Hanok: The traditional Korean house: a timber frame on a stone platform with plinth stones, heated ondol rooms and a wooden-floored maru, under a tiled or thatched roof. See Ondol, Maru, Giwa.
Hara (haras): The parapet of miniature shrines (kutas, shalas and panjaras) that edges each storey of a Dravida vimana. See Kuta, Shala.
Haram (prayer hall): The covered prayer hall of a mosque, on the qibla side of the courtyard. See Sahn, Qibla.
Harmika: The square railed enclosure on the summit of a stupa, from which the mast of parasols rises. See Chattra.
Harmonic mean (musical mean): The mean 2ab/(a + b), which divides an interval into musical ratios: between 6 and 12 it gives 8, and 6 : 8 : 12 contains the fourth, fifth and octave. See Arithmetic mean, Geometric mean.
Haunch (haunches): The part of an arch roughly midway between springing and crown, where a thin ring tends to crack and where builders heap filling to steady it. See Thrust.
Header (headers): A brick or stone laid with its length across the thickness of the wall, so that its end shows on the face. See Stretcher, English bond, Flemish bond.
Hearth: The fixed fireplace at the heart of a house or hall; in the Mycenaean megaron a large raised circle of painted plaster, open to a smoke-hole or lantern above. See Megaron.
Hearting (core): The core of rubble and mortar filling the inside of a thick wall or vault. In a corbelled vault it is the counterweight that keeps each overhanging half from tipping inward. See Corbelled vault.
Helix (helices): One of the small spiral volutes under the corners (and in the middle of each face) of a Corinthian abacus. See Corinthian, Volute.
Henge: A roughly circular earthwork of the Neolithic in Britain, with its ditch outside its bank, the reverse of a defensive work. See Trilithon.
Herbaceous border (herbaceous borders, mixed border, flower border): A long bed, usually backed by a wall or hedge, planted with hardy perennials that die down each winter, arranged by height, season and colour; with shrubs among them it is a mixed border. See Drift.
Herringbone brickwork (spina pesce, opus spicatum): Bricks laid diagonally or on end in a zigzag pattern; in Brunelleschi’s dome, vertical bricks inserted in spiralling herringbone bands to lock each ring of the brickwork while the mortar set.
High-Tech (high tech, Structural Expressionism): Late-modern architecture that exposes its structure and services and treats the building as a kit of industrial parts.
Hip (hips, hipped roof, hip roof): The sloping external angle where two roof planes meet over a corner of the building; a roof with slopes on all sides is a hipped roof. See Gable, Wudian.
Hood mould (dripstone, label): A projecting moulding over an arch or window that throws rainwater clear; called a label when square.
Horseshoe arch (horseshoe arches): An arch whose curve continues beyond the semicircle, so that the opening is narrower at the springing than at its widest; characteristic of Visigothic and Moorish Spain and the Maghreb. See Alfiz.
Hortus conclusus (enclosed garden): The enclosed garden of the Middle Ages, walled or fenced, with turf seats, flowers and a fountain; in art an emblem of the Virgin Mary. See Giardino segreto.
Hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar, hypars, hyperbolic paraboloids): A doubly curved saddle surface containing two families of straight lines; any four points not in one plane can be joined by one. Favoured for concrete shells because it can be formed with straight boards.
Hypocaust (hypocausts): The Roman under-floor heating system: a floor raised on small brick pillars (pilae) over a space through which hot gases from a furnace passed. See Thermae.
Hypostyle (hypostyle hall): A hall whose roof rests on many rows of columns (Greek hypo, under, stylos, column). The great example is the hall at Karnak with 134 columns, its taller central aisle lit by a clerestory. See Clerestory.
Iconostasis (templon): In an Orthodox church, the screen covered with icons that separates the sanctuary from the nave, pierced by the royal doors in the centre. It developed from the low marble chancel screen (templon) of early Byzantine churches. See Cross-in-square.
Imperial staircase (imperial stair): A stair with a single central flight rising to a landing, from which two flights return in the opposite direction on either side.
Impluvium: The shallow basin in the floor of a Roman atrium that received rainwater falling through the compluvium above, draining to a cistern. See Compluvium, Atrium.
Impost (imposts): The block or moulding at the top of a pier or wall on which an arch rests. See Springer.
Impost block (pulvino, dosseret): A block set between the capital of a column and the springing of the arch above, giving the arch a broader seat; in the Renaissance also called a pulvino or dosseret.
In antis: Of columns: set between the projecting ends of the side walls (the antae), as in the porch of the megaron and of the simplest Greek temples. See Megaron.
Inglenook (ingle, ingle-nook, inglenooks): A recess for sitting beside a large open fireplace, often with built-in benches under a low beam; revived by the Arts and Crafts and Edwardian architects as the heart of the living hall. See Living hall.
Inset corner (inset corners): A corner of a Maya platform stepped back into the mass, so that each terrace seems to be made of separate panels.
Insula (insulae): A Roman apartment block of several storeys, usually with shops (tabernae) on the ground floor: the housing of most city-dwellers in Rome and Ostia. Also a city block. See Domus, Taberna.
Intercolumniation: The clear space between two columns, measured in lower diameters. Vitruvius names five: pycnostyle, systyle, eustyle, diastyle and araeostyle. See Pycnostyle, Systyle, Eustyle, Diastyle, Araeostyle.
Interior street (rue intérieure, streets in the sky): A wide internal corridor serving flats and shops inside a large housing block, as in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation; the Smithsons’ “streets in the sky” were external versions.
International Style: The name given in 1932 by Hitchcock and Johnson to the modern architecture of the 1920s, defined by volume, regularity and the absence of ornament.
Intrados (soffit): The inner, lower curve of an arch: its underside, or soffit. See Extrados.
Ionic: The Greek order of Asia Minor and the islands, slender and graceful, with a capital of two spiral volutes and usually dentils in the cornice. See Volute.
Irimoya (irimoya-zukuri): The Japanese hip-and-gable roof, the most common roof of temples, palaces and farmhouses. See Xieshan, Kirizuma, Yosemune.
Isodomum (isodomic, isodomic masonry): Greek masonry of squared stones in courses of equal height, each vertical joint centred over the stone below (Vitruvius II.8). See Pseudisodomum, Emplekton.
Iwan (iwans, eyvan, ivan, īwān): A vaulted hall walled on three sides and open on the fourth, usually facing a courtyard; the characteristic space of Iranian architecture. See Pishtaq, Four-iwan plan.
Jagati (jagatī): The raised terrace or platform on which a North Indian temple stands.
Jali (jalis, jaali): A pierced stone or marble screen with a geometric or floral lattice, admitting light and air while giving privacy.
Jetty (jettied, jettying, jetties): The overhang of an upper storey in a timber-framed building: the floor joists run out past the wall below and carry the wall above on their ends, a foot or two further out. See Bressumer, Close studding.
Jian (bay (jian), jian (bay)): A bay: the space between two adjacent columns, the basic unit by which a Chinese (or Korean, or Japanese) hall is measured and described: “a hall of five jian”. The central bay is the mingjian. See Mingjian.
Juansha: “Rolling and cutting”: the faceted rounding of the ends of bracket arms, and the tapering of the upper third of a spindle column: the Chinese counterpart of entasis. See Gong.
Jǔzhé (juzhe, jǔ zhé, raising and depressing, jujia, jǔjià): The Song method of “raising and depressing” the roof: the ridge is raised by a fixed fraction of the depth (a third for great halls), then each purlin below it is lowered from a straight line by 1/10, 1/20, 1/40… of the rise, giving the concave Chinese roof. The Qing equivalent is jǔjià. See Purlin, Tailiang.
Kalasha (kalashas, kalaśa): A pot-shaped finial crowning a temple tower, gateway or hall roof.
Kancha (cancha): The basic Inca building group: rectangular single-room buildings set round an open courtyard inside an enclosing wall.
Karesansui (kare-sansui, dry landscape, dry garden, dry landscape garden): “Dry mountain and water”: the Japanese dry landscape garden, in which stones stand for mountains and islands and raked gravel or sand for water, as at Ryōan-ji and Daisen-in. See Shakkei, Roji.
Karikomi (o-karikomi): In the Japanese garden, shrubs such as azaleas clipped into rounded masses, singly or in groups that echo the forms of hills or waves. See Topiary.
Katsuogi (katsuo-gi): Short cylindrical billets laid across the ridge of a Shintō shrine, originally to weigh down the thatch; ten at the Inner Shrine of Ise, nine at the Outer. See Chigi.
Ken (kenma, tsubo): The interval between two columns; from the late sixteenth century a fixed length of 6 shaku, about 1.82 m, on which Japanese houses were planned. One ken square is a tsubo. See Tatami, Kiwari, Jian.
Keystone (key): The central voussoir at the crown of an arch, the last to be set; it locks the ring. Pointed arches often have a joint at the apex instead. See Voussoir.
Kirizuma (kirizuma-zukuri): The Japanese gable roof, two slopes meeting at a ridge; the roof of Ise and of many houses. See Gable, Irimoya.
Kiwari: “Dividing the wood”: the Japanese carpenters’ system of proportion, in which every member of a building is sized by a chain of ratios from one base dimension, usually the bay. See Ken, Cai.
Knot garden (knot, knots, knot gardens): A bed laid out in an interlacing pattern of low clipped hedges of box, thyme, hyssop or lavender, the spaces filled with flowers or coloured earth; popular in Tudor and Elizabethan England. See Parterre, Broderie.
Kokoshnik (kokoshniki): In Russian architecture, a decorative gable, semicircular or ogee-pointed, set in tiers around the base of a drum or a tent. Named after a traditional headdress. See Zakomara, Onion dome.
Kufic (Kufic script): An angular style of Arabic script used for early Qur’ans and monumental inscriptions, sometimes laid out on a square grid (square Kufic).
Külliye (kulliye): An Ottoman complex of charitable buildings (mosque, schools, hospital, kitchens, baths) grouped round a mosque.
Kuta (kutas, kūṭa): A square miniature pavilion with a domical roof, placed at the corners of each storey of a Dravida vimana.
Laconicum: The dry sweating room of a Roman bath: circular, domed, with an opening in the crown closed by a movable bronze disc (Vitruvius V.10). See Thermae, Oculus.
Lancet (lancet arch, lancet window, lancets): A tall, narrow pointed arch, or a window with such a head: the characteristic window of Early Gothic and of Early English. See Pointed arch.
Landing (landings): A level platform at the top of a flight of stairs or between two flights.
Lantern: A small turret, open or glazed on its sides, set over the eye of a dome or over a roof to admit light and air and to weigh down and finish the crown. See Oculus, Dome.
Latina: The single-spired form of the Nagara shikhara, with curving faces divided by rathas and bhumis.
Lattice girder (lattice girders, lattice truss, Warren truss): A long-span steel or iron truss: top and bottom chords joined by a zigzag of diagonals, so that every member is only in tension or compression. Used in bridges, sheds and the floors of high-tech buildings. See Truss, Space frame.
Leaded light (leaded lights, leaded panes, quarries): A window of small panes of glass, square or diamond, held in strips of lead (cames); the glazing of the Tudor house. See Mullion, Casement.
Leak window (leak windows, lou chuang, louchuang, lattice window, lattice windows): In the Chinese garden, an opening in a wall filled with a lattice of tile, brick or plaster in a decorative pattern, through which the next part of the garden is half seen. See Moon gate.
Lesene (lesenes, pilaster strip, pilaster strips): A pilaster strip: a shallow vertical projection without base or capital, articulating a Romanesque wall. See Lombard band.
Lierne (liernes, lierne vault, stellar vault): A short tertiary rib that springs neither from the springer nor from the central boss but links other ribs, forming stars and nets. See Tierceron.
Light (lights): One of the vertical glazed divisions of a window between mullions. See Mullion.
Lintel (lintels): A horizontal beam spanning an opening and carrying the load above it. In stone its span is limited by the stone’s weakness in tension. See Post-and-lintel, Relieving triangle.
Living hall (living-hall): In the late Victorian and Edwardian house, a large hall used as a family sitting room, with a fireplace, often an inglenook, from which the other rooms open. Baillie Scott would have its stair enclosed or kept out of it, so that it was no longer a passage; others set the stair to one side of it. See Inglenook.
Loggia: A gallery or room open on one or more sides, usually through an arcade or colonnade, either free-standing or set into a building. Brunelleschi’s Innocenti loggia and Palladio’s villa porticoes are loggias. See Portico, Arcade.
Lombard band (Lombard bands, corbel table, arched corbel table): A frieze of small round arches on corbels under the eaves, usually linking shallow pilaster strips; the signature of First Romanesque. See Lesene.
Long gallery: A long room on the upper floor of an Elizabethan or Jacobean great house, running much of its length, for walking and exercise in bad weather and for showing portraits. See Solar.
Lotiform (lotus column): Of an Egyptian column: shaped like a bundle of lotus stems, with a capital of closed buds. See Papyriform.
Mandapa (mandapas, mantapa, maha-mandapa, ardha-mandapa): A pillared hall or pavilion of a Hindu temple, in front of the sanctum or free-standing.
Mansard (mansard roof, comble brisé): A roof with two slopes on every side, the lower steep (often with dormers) and the upper shallow, named after François Mansart; it gains a habitable storey within the roof. See Gambrel.
Maqsura (maqsūra): An enclosed area near the mihrab reserved for the ruler, screened by a grille or marked by domes.
Marche: The sequence of spaces experienced when walking through a building, especially along its main axis; a key criterion in judging a Beaux-Arts plan. See Parti, Axis.
Martyrium (martyria): A church or shrine built over the grave of a martyr or at a holy site, often centrally planned (round, octagonal or cross-shaped). See Baptistery.
Maru (daecheong, daecheong maru): A raised floor of timber boards in a Korean house, open or openable to the air, used in summer; the central hall is the daecheong. See Hanok, Ondol.
Mastaba: An Egyptian tomb of the early dynasties: a low, flat-topped rectangular mass with battered sides (Arabic mastaba, bench) over a shaft leading to the burial chamber, with a chapel or false door for offerings. See Pyramid.
Medhi: The circular terrace or drum on which the dome of a stupa stands, carrying an upper path for circumambulation. See Stupa.
Megalith (megaliths, megalithic, menhir): A very large stone used in a monument, either alone (a standing stone, or menhir) or with others in circles, rows and chambered tombs (Greek megas, great, lithos, stone). See Dolmen, Trilithon.
Megaron: The principal hall of a Mycenaean palace: an open porch with two columns between the ends of the side walls, a vestibule, and a great rectangular hall with a round hearth ringed by four columns. The plan is an ancestor of the Greek temple. See Hearth, In antis.
Metope (metopes): The square panel between two triglyphs in a Doric frieze, plain or carved with relief sculpture. See Triglyph, Frieze.
Mihrab (mihrabs, miḥrāb): A niche in the middle of the qibla wall of a mosque, marking the direction of prayer; often the most richly decorated part of the building. See Qibla, Minbar.
Minaret (minarets): The tower of a mosque from which the call to prayer is given; square in the Maghreb, cylindrical in Iran, slender and polygonal in Ottoman lands. See Şerefe.
Minbar (minbars): The pulpit of a mosque, a stepped seat, usually of carved wood or marble, to the right of the mihrab, from which the Friday sermon is given. See Mihrab.
Mingjian: The central bay of a Chinese hall, on the axis, containing the main doors; it is the widest bay, the others diminishing toward the ends. See Jian.
Modillion (modillions): An ornamental scrolled bracket set in a row under the corona of a Corinthian or Composite cornice. See Cornice.
Module: The unit of measure from which all parts of an order are proportioned: usually the lower diameter of the column (D), or half of it, the radius (M), as in Vitruvius’s Doric and all of Vignola. See Order.
Modulor: Le Corbusier’s scale of proportions (1948): a red series growing by the golden ratio from 183 cm and a blue series of its doubles, derived from a human figure.
Mokoshi: A pent roof or skirt added round the lower storey of a Japanese hall or pagoda, making a single-storey building look two-storeyed. See Irimoya.
Monopteros (monopteral): A round temple consisting of a ring of columns without an enclosed cella. See Tholos.
Moon gate (moon gates, moon door): A circular doorway in a garden wall, used in Chinese gardens to frame the view of the space beyond like a picture. See Leak window.
Mortise and tenon (mortise-and-tenon, tenon, mortise): A carpenter’s joint: a projecting tongue (tenon) fits a matching hole (mortise). At Stonehenge it fixes the lintels to the uprights, a timber joint worked in stone.
Moulding (molding, mouldings): A continuous strip of profile run along an edge or surface. Classical mouldings are built from a small alphabet: fillet, torus, astragal, scotia, ovolo, cavetto and the two cymas.
Mount (mounts, garden mount): An artificial mound in a garden, often spiralled by a path and topped by an arbour or summer house, from which the garden and the country beyond could be seen; common in Tudor and Stuart England.
Mount Meru (Meru): The mountain at the centre of the universe in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cosmology, with five peaks, imitated by temple towers and temple-mountains.
Mullion (mullions): A vertical bar dividing a window into lights. See Transom, Light.
Muqarnas (stalactite vault, honeycomb vault, mocárabe): Vaulting or corbelling made of tiers of small niche-like cells, each tier projecting over the one below; used in squinches, domes, portals and cornices. See Squinch.
Mutule (mutules): A flat block projecting under the corona of a Doric cornice, above each triglyph and each metope, its underside studded with guttae. See Guttae.
Naga balustrade (naga balustrades, naga): A balustrade in the form of a serpent (naga) whose body forms the rail and whose many-headed hood rears at the end; lines Khmer causeways.
Naos (barque shrine): The innermost shrine of a temple, holding the cult image; in Egypt a stone or wooden shrine in the sanctuary, often with the sacred barque on its pedestal before it. See Hypostyle.
Narthex (exonarthex): The vestibule or porch across the entrance end of an Early Christian or Byzantine church, between the atrium or street and the nave. Large churches may have an inner and an outer narthex (exonarthex). See Atrium, Basilica.
Nave: The central, usually taller and wider, space of a basilica or church, running from the entrance toward the altar. From Latin navis, ship. See Aisle, Basilica, Clerestory.
Necking (hypotrachelium): The plain band at the top of a Tuscan or Doric shaft, between the astragal and the capital proper. Also called the hypotrachelium. See Capital.
Newel (newels, newel post): The central post of a winding stair, round which the steps turn; also the post at the end of a stair rail. See Winder.
Niche (niches): A recess in a wall, usually round-headed, to hold a statue or give relief to the surface.
Nosing (nosings): The rounded or projecting front edge of a stair tread.
Noyane (hidden roof): The hidden roof of Japanese carpentry: a steep weather roof framed above the visible rafters and ceiling, so that the visible eaves can be low and deep. See Hanegi.
Nymphaeum (nymphaea): In Roman and Renaissance gardens, a grotto or architectural fountain dedicated to the nymphs, with niches, statues and running water. See Grotto.
Obelisk: A tall four-sided monolith tapering upward to a pyramidion, set up in pairs before Egyptian temple pylons as a solar emblem. Its height is typically about ten times the width of its base. See Pyramidion, Pylon.
Oculus (oculi): A circular opening, especially the open “eye” at the crown of a dome, as in the Pantheon, where it is some 8.2 m across and the only source of light. Also a round window. See Dome, Lantern.
Ogee (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 Curvilinear tracery.
Ondol (gudeul, agungi): The Korean heated floor: smoke from a kitchen fire passes through stone-lined flues under the floor slabs of a room to a chimney on the far side, warming the floor itself. See Hanok.
Onion dome (onion domes, onion): A bulbous dome that swells out beyond its drum and tapers to a point, characteristic of Russian churches from the sixteenth century. It is usually a timber-framed shell sheathed in metal over a lower masonry vault. See Drum, Kokoshnik.
Open plan (open-plan): An interior with few or no full-height partitions, in which living, dining and working areas flow into one another. See Free plan, Universal space.
Optical refinements (refinements, scamilli impares): Deliberate departures from straight lines and exact regularity in Greek temples (the curvature of stylobate and entablature, the inward lean of columns, entasis and the thickening of corner columns), measured at the Parthenon by Penrose. See Entasis.
Opus caementicium (Roman concrete, caementa): Roman concrete: fragments of stone, brick or tuff (caementa) laid in a mortar of lime and sand or pozzolana. Normally built between facings of stone or brick. See Pozzolana, Opus testaceum, Opus reticulatum.
Opus incertum: Roman wall facing of small irregular stones set at random in the mortar of a concrete wall. Vitruvius judged it strong but not beautiful. See Opus reticulatum, Opus caementicium.
Opus mixtum: Roman walling combining reticulatum panels with bands and quoins of brick. See Opus reticulatum, Opus testaceum.
Opus quadratum: Roman walling of squared stone blocks in regular courses, often of tufa blocks two Roman feet high laid alternately as headers and stretchers. See Isodomum, Header, Stretcher.
Opus reticulatum (reticulate): Roman wall facing of small tufa blocks with square faces set diagonally, forming a net-like pattern; the blocks are pyramids whose points are embedded in the concrete core. See Opus incertum, Opus mixtum.
Opus testaceum (opus latericium, brick-faced concrete): Roman wall facing of fired brick, typically of triangular bricks with their points in the concrete core, often with bonding courses of large square tiles (bipedales) through the wall. The standard facing of imperial Rome. See Opus caementicium, Bipedalis.
Orangery (orangeries, orangerie): A building with tall south-facing windows in which orange and lemon trees grown in tubs were kept over the winter; at Versailles a vaulted gallery under the terrace (1684–86). See Conservatory.
Orchestra: The circular or semicircular level floor of a theatre between the seats and the stage. In the Greek theatre the chorus performed there; in the Roman theatre it held the seats of senators. See Cavea, Scaenae frons.
Order: A column with its entablature (and optionally a pedestal), proportioned and ornamented according to one of the accepted systems: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian or Composite. See Column, Entablature.
Organic architecture (organic): Architecture conceived, in Wright’s sense, as a whole in which every part relates to the others and to the site, as in a living thing.
Oriel (oriel window, oriels): A bay window projecting from an upper storey and supported on corbels or brackets.
Orthostat (orthostats): A large stone slab set upright, forming a wall or the base of a wall.
Oval (oval plan): In architecture, an elongated closed curve used for plans and domes, usually built from four or more circular arcs rather than a true ellipse; the characteristic plan of Baroque churches.
Ovolo (quarter round): A convex moulding of a quarter-circle (or quarter-ellipse) section; often carved with egg-and-dart. See Echinus, Egg-and-dart.
Pada (padas): One of the equal squares into which the Vastu Purusha Mandala is divided, each the seat of a deity.
Pagoda (ta, tō, pagodas): A tower of storeys and projecting roofs built over relics, descended from the Indian stupa; in China and Korea of timber, brick or stone, in Japan almost always of timber, with a central pillar and a bronze spire. See Shinbashira, Sōrin.
Paifang (pailou, memorial arch): A ceremonial gateway of timber or stone (posts, lintels and small roofs) erected across a street or at the entrance to a tomb or temple to commemorate a person or an event. Also pailou. See Torii.
Palazzo (palazzi): An Italian town house of a leading family or a public body, typically built round a cortile with a rusticated ground floor and a piano nobile above. See Cortile.
Palissade (palissades, palisade, charmille): A tall clipped hedge forming a green wall, usually of hornbeam, beech or lime, lining the allées and bosquets of a French formal garden. See Allée, Bosquet.
Palmiform (palm column): Of an Egyptian column: a round shaft crowned by a capital of palm fronds bound to the top and curling outward. See Papyriform.
Pantry: The room where bread and other dry food were kept, beside the buttery off the screens passage (from the Old French paneterie, from pain, bread); later any small room for food or tableware. See Buttery.
Papyriform (papyrus column, campaniform): Of an Egyptian column: shaped like a papyrus plant or a bundle of papyrus stems, with a capital in the form of a closed bud or an open umbel (the campaniform, or bell, capital). See Lotiform, Palmiform.
Parametric design (parametric, parametrics): Design by defining rules and parameters from which a form is generated, so that changing a parameter changes the whole design consistently. See Attractor, Parametricism.
Parametricism: Patrik Schumacher’s name (2008) for a style of architecture generated by parametric rules, favouring continuous variation over repetition.
Parterre (parterres, parterre à l’anglaise, water parterre): A level area of ornamental beds near a house, laid out in a pattern to be seen from above. Dézallier d’Argenville distinguishes parterres of embroidery, of compartments, English parterres of grass cut-work, and water parterres. See Broderie, Knot garden.
Parti: In Beaux-Arts teaching, the basic idea or scheme of a plan, chosen in the first sketch (esquisse) and developed thereafter. See Marche, Poché, Esquisse.
Passive house (Passivhaus, passive houses): A building so insulated, airtight and ventilated with heat recovery that it needs almost no heating; the German Passivhaus standard sets 15 kWh/m² a year.
Passive solar design (passive solar): Heating, cooling and lighting a building by its form, orientation, glazing, shading and mass, without mechanical systems.
Patte d’oie (pattes d’oie, goose foot, goosefoot): A goose foot: three or more avenues or allées radiating from a single point, used in the French garden and in Baroque town planning. See Allée.
Pattern language (pattern, patterns): Christopher Alexander’s network of 253 recurring design problems and their solutions (1977), meant to be combined like words in a language.
Pedestal: The base on which a column may stand, with its own plinth, die and cornice (cap). Vignola makes it one third of the column’s height. See Die, Plinth.
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 Tympanum, Acroterion.
Pendentive (pendentives): A curved triangular surface (part of a sphere) that fills the corner between two arches and carries a circular dome or drum over a square bay. The sphere passes through the corners of the square; the pendentives are the parts of it left inside the square below the circle inscribed in it. See Squinch, Dome.
Pergola (pergolas): A garden walk or terrace covered by an open framework of beams on posts or piers, for climbing plants to grow over. See Porch.
Peripteral (peripteros): A temple surrounded on all four sides by a single row of columns (the peristyle). See Peristyle, Dipteral.
Peristyle: A continuous row of columns surrounding a building or a court. See Peripteral.
Perpendicular tracery (panel tracery, Perpendicular): English late-Gothic tracery in which the mullions run straight up to the arch and are crossed by transoms, dividing the window into panels. See Four-centred arch, Fan vault.
Perron: An external flight of steps leading to the principal entrance of a building, often with a platform at the top.
Piano nobile (principal floor): The “noble floor”: the principal storey of an Italian palace or villa, containing the main reception rooms, raised above a basement or ground floor of service rooms. See Rustication.
Picturesque (the picturesque): In the late eighteenth century, the quality of a scene that would make a picture; for Uvedale Price (1794), a distinct aesthetic quality made of roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, between the beautiful and the sublime. See Claude glass, Cottage orné.
Pietra dura (parchin kari): Inlay of cut and polished semi-precious stones in marble, forming pictures or patterns; used lavishly by the Mughals at the Taj Mahal.
Pilaster: A flat, shallow pier projecting slightly from a wall, treated with the base, capital and proportions of an order. See Anta.
Pilotis (piloti): Slender columns (French: stilts) that lift a building above the ground, leaving the ground floor open. The first of Le Corbusier’s five points. See Free plan, Five points.
Pinnacle (pinnacles, Fiale): A small turret-like termination, square in plan with a steep pyramidal spire, crowning a buttress; its weight helps to steady the pier. See Crocket, Finial.
Pishtaq (pishtaqs, pīshṭāq): A tall rectangular portal screen framing an iwan arch and rising above the roofline, bordered by inscription bands and often flanked by minarets. See Iwan, Alfiz.
Pitch (roof pitch, slope): The slope of a roof, given as an angle, as a ratio of rise to run (e.g. 9 in 12), or as the rise over the span. Each covering has a minimum pitch below which it will leak. See Gable.
Plate tracery: The earliest tracery: separate openings (lancets, circles, foils) cut through a flat plate of stone. See Bar tracery.
Pleaching (pleached, pleach, pleached allée, stilt hedge): Training the branches of a row of trees, usually lime or hornbeam, sideways and weaving them together so that the crowns form a continuous flat hedge raised on bare trunks; a hedge on stilts. See Espalier, Palissade.
Plinth: The square slab at the bottom of a column base or pedestal. See Base.
Poché (poche): The solid parts of a plan (walls, piers, masses of masonry) filled in black; by extension the thick masonry itself. See Parti.
Podium: The high platform on which a Roman temple stands, with a flight of steps only at the front, in contrast to the Greek crepidoma, stepped on every side. See Crepidoma.
Pointed arch (ogival arch): An arch of two arcs meeting at an apex; equilateral when each is struck from the opposite springing, lancet when sharper, drop when blunter. See Lancet, Equilateral arch.
Pointed architecture (pointed style): Pugin’s and his contemporaries’ name for Gothic, from its pointed arches.
Polygonal masonry (polygonal): Masonry of stones cut to irregular many-sided shapes, each fitted precisely to its neighbours without regular courses: the finest Inca work, and some early Greek walls. See Ashlar.
Polylobed arch (polylobed arches, multifoil arch, cusped arch): An arch whose intrados is cut into a series of lobes or foils; much used in Córdoba and in Mughal architecture (as the cusped arch).
Porch (porches, sleeping porch): A covered entrance to a building, projecting from it or set into it; in the Craftsman house, a deep outdoor room across the front. See Veranda.
Portico (porticoes, porticos): A porch with a roof carried on columns, often with a pediment, forming the entrance of a building; described by the number of columns in front (tetrastyle, hexastyle). See Loggia.
Post-and-lintel (trabeation, trabeated, post and lintel, post-and-beam): The structural system of upright supports and horizontal beams, in which every member is either in compression (the posts) or in bending (the beams). Also called trabeated construction. See Lintel, Trilithon.
Pozzolana (pozzuolana, pulvis puteolanus): Volcanic ash from the region of Pozzuoli and Vesuvius which, mixed with lime, makes a mortar that sets hard even under water (a hydraulic cement). Vitruvius describes it in Book II. See Opus caementicium.
Pradakshina (pradakshina patha, circumambulation, pradakshina path): Circumambulation keeping the sacred object on the right, i.e. clockwise; also the path provided for it.
Praecinctio (praecinctiones, diazoma): A horizontal passage running round the cavea of a theatre between tiers of seats. See Cavea.
Prairie style (Prairie School, Prairie house): The low, horizontal houses of Frank Lloyd Wright and his circle in the American Midwest, c. 1900–1915: hipped roofs with deep eaves, bands of windows, central hearths.
Prakara (prakaras, prākāra): An enclosure wall of a temple compound; great southern temples have several, one inside another.
Prasat (prasats, prang): A Khmer shrine tower on a square, redented plan, rising in diminishing tiers.
Primitive hut (rustic hut): The imagined first shelter of mankind (in Laugier’s version four trees, beams and a pitched roof), used as a model to judge which parts of architecture are essential.
Pronaos: The porch in front of a temple’s cella, enclosed by the side walls and usually opened by two columns in antis. See Cella.
Prostyle (amphiprostyle): A temple with a row of columns across its front only. Amphiprostyle: with columns at both ends. See Peripteral.
Protome (double-bull capital, bull capital, protomes): The forepart of an animal used as an ornament or a support; the Persian double-bull capital joins two kneeling bull protomes back to back, with a saddle between their necks for a beam.
Pseudisodomum (pseudisodomic, pseudo-isodomic): Greek masonry of squared stones in courses of unequal height, typically tall courses alternating with thin ones. See Isodomum.
Pseudoperipteral: A temple that seems to be surrounded by columns but whose side and rear columns are engaged in the cella walls, like the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. See Peripteral.
Purlin (purlins): A horizontal beam running the length of a roof, carrying the rafters; in East Asian frames the purlins rest directly on posts or beam-ends and their heights set the profile of the roof. See Rafter, Jǔzhé.
Pycnostyle: The closest intercolumniation: one and a half diameters. See Intercolumniation.
Pylon: The monumental gateway of an Egyptian temple: two massive battered towers, crowned with a cavetto cornice, flanking a lower portal. Its outline recalls the hieroglyph for the horizon, the sun rising between two hills. See Batter, Cavetto cornice.
Pyramid: A solid on a square base whose four triangular faces meet at an apex; in Egypt the royal tomb of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, set out by its base and its seked. See Seked, Mastaba, Pyramidion.
Pyramidion: The capstone of a pyramid or the pointed tip of an obelisk, often of fine stone and sometimes sheathed in gilded metal to catch the sun. See Obelisk.
Qibla (qibla wall): The direction of the Kaaba in Mecca, towards which Muslims pray; also the wall of a mosque that faces it. See Mihrab.
Quadrant vault (half-barrel): A half-barrel vault, quarter-circle in section, often used over galleries to buttress a higher barrel vault. See Gallery.
Quadratura: Illusionistic ceiling and wall painting of architecture in steep perspective, extending real walls into painted ones; perfected in Baroque Italy. See Trompe-l’oeil.
Quadripartite vault: A rib vault in which two diagonal ribs divide each bay into four cells: the standard vault of High Gothic. See Sexpartite vault.
Quincunx (quincunxes): An arrangement of five elements, four at the corners of a square and one at its centre, as in the five towers of Angkor Wat.
Quinto acuto (pointed fifth): The “pointed fifth”: a Tuscan construction for a pointed arch or dome profile in which each arc has a radius of four-fifths of the span. It governs the angle ribs of the Florence dome.
Quoin (quoins): One of the dressed stones at the corner of a building, often laid alternately long and short and emphasised by rustication.
Radiating chapels (radiating chapel): Chapels opening off an ambulatory and set radially around the apse. See Ambulatory, Chevet.
Rafter (rafters, flying rafter, feizi): One of the inclined timbers running from ridge or purlin down to the eaves and carrying the roof covering. In Chinese roofs the eave rafters are extended by flatter flying rafters (feizi). See Purlin, Eaves.
Ratha (rathas, bhadra, karna): A vertical projection of the wall and tower of a temple; plans are tri-, pancha- or sapta-ratha according to the number on each face. (Also a temple chariot.)
Redented (redenting): Of a plan: with corners stepped back in a series of small right-angled recesses, as in Khmer towers and many Indian temples.
Regula: The short fillet beneath the taenia of a Doric architrave, under each triglyph, from which the guttae hang. See Guttae.
Regulating lines (tracés régulateurs, regulating line): Geometric lines, often diagonals of similar rectangles, used to check and unify the proportions of a façade (French tracés régulateurs).
Reinforced concrete (ferro-concrete, béton armé): Concrete with embedded steel bars: the concrete resists compression, the steel tension, so beams, slabs and cantilevers become possible. Developed by Monier, Hennebique and others from the 1860s to the 1890s.
Relieving triangle (relieving triangles): A triangular opening left above a lintel by corbelling the courses on either side, so that the weight of the wall passes down to the jambs instead of bearing on the middle of the lintel. At Mycenae it was screened by a thin slab; at the Lion Gate, by the lion relief. See Lintel, Corbel.
Respond (responds, vaulting shaft): A half-pier or shaft attached to a wall to carry one end of an arch or rib. See Compound pier.
Ressaut (ressauts, break): A projection of an entablature or moulding where it breaks forward over a column or pilaster.
Rib (ribs): A projecting arch of stone on the underside of a vault, marking and supporting a groin or ridge. See Rib vault, Tierceron, Lierne.
Rib vault (ribbed vault): A vault built on a framework of arched ribs (transverse, wall and diagonal) with thin webs filling the cells between them. See Quadripartite vault, Web, Boss.
Ribbon window (strip window, fenêtre en longueur, ribbon windows): A continuous horizontal band of windows running along a façade (French fenêtre en longueur).
Ridge (ridge beam, ridge purlin): The horizontal line at the top of a pitched roof where two slopes meet; also the capping (of tiles, lead or timber) that covers the joint. See Hip, Purlin.
Ridge rib (ridge ribs): A rib running along the crown of a vault, longitudinally or transversely, linking the bosses. See Tierceron.
Ridge-and-furrow (ridge and furrow, ridge-and-furrow roof, ridge-and-furrow glazing): A roof glazed in a series of small ridges and valleys, proposed by J. C. Loudon in 1817 and used by Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth and on the Crystal Palace; the panes meet the low sun more squarely and the folds stiffen the roof. See Conservatory.
Rill (rills): A narrow, straight channel of water at ground level in a formal garden, as in the gardens of Lutyens and Jekyll at Hestercombe, after Mughal and Moorish models. See Catena d’acqua, Chadar.
Rise: The height of an arch from its springing line to the intrados at the crown. A semicircular arch rises half its span; a segmental less; a pointed more. See Span.
Riser (risers, rise): The vertical face of a step, and its height; with the going it fixes the steepness of a stair. See Going.
Riwaq (riwaqs, riwāq): An arcaded portico or gallery round the courtyard of a mosque or madrasa. See Sahn.
Rocaille: Asymmetrical ornament of shells, rocks, foam, C- and S-curves developed in France in the 1720s–30s, from which the word Rococo derives.
Roji (tea garden): The “dewy path”: the garden leading to a Japanese teahouse, with stepping stones, a stone water basin for washing the hands and mouth, stone lanterns and modest planting. See Karesansui.
Roof comb (roof combs, crestería): A tall crest of masonry built on the roof of a Maya temple, often pierced to lighten it and once modelled in painted stucco with figures of rulers and gods. See Corbelled vault.
Roof garden (roof terrace): A flat roof used as a garden or terrace; the fifth of Le Corbusier’s points.
Rose window (rose, roses, wheel window): A large circular window with tracery radiating from its centre, usually in a west or transept façade. See Tracery.
Roughcast (pebbledash, harling): An external render of lime and coarse aggregate thrown on to the wall, leaving a rough texture; often whitened, and favoured by Voysey and the Edwardian architects. See Tile-hanging.
Royal cubit (cubit, palm, palms): The Egyptian unit of building, about 52.4 cm, divided into seven palms of four fingers each. Wooden and stone cubit rods marked with its subdivisions survive from many tombs. See Seked.
Rustication (rusticated): Masonry cut in massive blocks separated by deep joints, with faces left rough or tooled, used on the lower storeys of Renaissance palaces to suggest strength. Smooth rustication with only the joints emphasised is common in later classicism. See Quoin, Piano nobile.
Şadırvan (sadirvan): The ablution fountain in the courtyard of an Ottoman mosque, often polygonal and covered by a canopy.
Sahn (sahns): The open courtyard of a mosque, usually surrounded by porticoes, where the overflow of worshippers can pray and where the ablution fountain stands. See Riwaq, Haram.
Sail vault (vela, pendentive dome): A vault formed from a single hemisphere cut by the four vertical sides of a square bay, so that each side is a semicircular arch; also called a pendentive dome or vela.
Salle de verdure (salles de verdure, cabinet de verdure, green room): A green room: an open space enclosed by clipped hedges or trees within a bosquet, used for dining, dancing or theatre in the French formal garden. See Bosquet.
Sarsen (sarsens): A hard silcrete sandstone found as boulders on the chalk downs of southern England; the large stones of Stonehenge are sarsens.
Sash window (sash, sashes, sash windows): A window of two glazed frames (sashes) sliding up and down in grooves, balanced by weights on cords hidden in the frame; the window of the Georgian and Victorian house. See Casement, Fanlight.
Scaenae frons (scaena, scene building, pulpitum, skene): The richly columned front of the stage building of a Roman theatre, rising in two or three storeys with a royal door in the centre and two guest doors at the sides. See Orchestra, Cavea.
Scotia (trochilus): A deep concave moulding, most often between the two tori of an Attic base, where its shadow separates them. See Attic base.
Screens passage (screens, cross passage): The passage through a medieval or Tudor house from the front door to the back, at the lower end of the hall, divided from it by a timber screen. The buttery, the pantry and the way to the kitchen opened off it; a gallery for musicians often ran over it. See Buttery, Pantry, Solar.
Scroll (façade volute, console): On a façade, a large S- or C-shaped volute that links two storeys of different width, as on Santa Maria Novella and Il Gesù; also used as a bracket (console). See Volute.
Segmental pediment: A pediment whose upper edge is a segment of a circle rather than two straight rakes. See Broken pediment.
Seked (sekad, seqed): The Egyptian measure of a slope: the horizontal run, in palms and fingers, for one cubit (seven palms) of vertical rise. The smaller the seked, the steeper the face; the Great Pyramid has a seked of 5½ palms. See Royal cubit, Batter.
Semicircular arch (semicircular, round arch, round arches): A round arch whose intrados is a half-circle struck from one centre on the springing line; its rise is always half its span. The arch of Rome and of the Romanesque. See Pointed arch, Rise.
Semidome (half-dome, conch, semidomes): Half a dome, covering a semicircular space such as an apse or an exedra. At Hagia Sophia two great semidomes extend the central dome to east and west. See Apse, Exedra.
Şerefe (serefe, şerefes): A balcony on an Ottoman minaret, carried on corbels or muqarnas; the number of balconies marks the rank of the mosque’s founder. See Minaret.
Serliana (Palladian window, Venetian window, Palladian motif): An opening of three parts (a central arch springing from the entablature of two narrower, flat-headed side openings), published by Serlio in 1537; also called the Palladian or Venetian window.
Setback (setbacks): The stepping back of the upper part of a building from the street line, required by zoning laws to let light and air reach the street. See Zoning envelope.
Sexpartite vault: A rib vault over a double bay, divided into six cells by two diagonals and an intermediate transverse rib. See Quadripartite vault, Alternating supports.
Shaft: The long main body of a column, between base and capital. See Entasis, Flute.
Shakkei (borrowed scenery, borrowed view, borrowed views, jiejing, jie jing): Borrowed scenery: a view from beyond the garden, a mountain, a pagoda or a neighbour’s trees, drawn into its composition. The Chinese jiejing is named in Ji Cheng’s Yuanye (1631); the Japanese shakkei is the same device. See Moon gate, Karesansui.
Shaku: The Japanese foot, standardised at 10/33 m (about 30.3 cm); a ken is 6 shaku. See Ken.
Shala (shalas, śālā, sala): An oblong miniature pavilion with a barrel roof and horseshoe gable ends, placed in the middle of each side of a Dravida storey.
Shatyor (tent roof, tented roof, tent): The tent roof of Russian architecture: a tall octagonal pyramid of timber or masonry crowning a church or tower, as at the Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye (1532). See Kokoshnik.
Shell (shells, thin shell, shell structure): A thin curved slab, usually of concrete, that carries load by forces within its own surface rather than by bending; it can span far with very little thickness. See Hyperbolic paraboloid.
Shengqi (sheng qi, gwisoseum, rising corners): The progressive heightening of the columns of a Chinese hall from the centre toward the corners, 2 cun per column in the Yingzao fashi, which lifts the ends of the eave line. Korean gwisoseum. See Cejiao.
Shikhara (shikharas, śikhara, sikhara): In North India, the curvilinear tower over the sanctum of a temple; in the South, the domed crowning member of the vimana. See Amalaka, Vimana.
Shinbashira (shin-bashira, central pillar): The central pillar of a Japanese pagoda, running from the foundation to the spire without carrying the storeys, which are stacked around it. See Pagoda, Sōrin.
Shingle (shingles, shingled): A thin tile of split or sawn wood, usually cedar, laid in overlapping courses on roofs and walls; in America the covering of the Shingle style and the Craftsman bungalow. See Clapboard.
Shinmei-zukuri (shinmei zukuri, shinmei): The shrine style of Ise: a raised hall of unpainted cypress on posts set in the ground, entered on the long side, under a straight thatched gable roof with chigi, katsuogi and free-standing ridge posts. See Chigi, Katsuogi, Taisha-zukuri.
Shoin (shoin-zukuri, shoin style): A writing bay built into the wall of a reception room; by extension the style of residence (shoin-zukuri) with tatami floors, sliding screens, tokonoma and staggered shelves that became the basis of the traditional Japanese house. See Tokonoma, Tatami.
Shoji (shōji): A sliding screen of translucent paper on a light wooden lattice, used on the outer side of rooms to admit diffused light. See Fusuma, Engawa.
Siheyuan (courtyard house, si he yuan): The Beijing courtyard house: four buildings round a court, the main hall to the north facing south, side halls east and west, a south row, and a gate in the south-east corner. See Yingshan.
Soffit: The exposed underside of an architectural element: of an architrave, a cornice, an arch or a balcony.
Solar (great chamber): The private chamber of the family in a medieval house, usually on the upper floor at the upper end of the hall, beyond the high table; later called the great chamber. See Screens passage, Long gallery.
Solar altitude (sun altitude): The angle of the sun above the horizon; at noon it equals 90° minus the latitude, plus or minus up to 23.44° with the seasons.
Sōrin (sorin, spire, kurin): The bronze spire of a Japanese pagoda: a dew basin and inverted bowl, a lotus, nine rings, a water-flame openwork and a jewel, threaded on the top of the central pillar. See Pagoda.
Space frame (space truss): A three-dimensional truss of short struts and nodes, able to span in two directions over large areas.
Span: The horizontal distance between the supports of an arch, beam or vault, measured between the springing points. See Rise.
Spandrel (spandrels): The roughly triangular area of wall between the curve of an arch and the rectangle that frames it (or between two adjacent arches), often filled with ornament, such as the Victories on the triumphal arches. See Triumphal arch.
Spandrel panel (spandrel panels): In a curtain wall, the opaque panel at each floor that hides the slab edge and the ceiling void between the bands of vision glass.
Specus: The water channel of a Roman aqueduct, lined with waterproof mortar and covered with slabs or a vault; on the Pont du Gard about 1.2 m wide and 1.8 m high. See Aqueduct.
Spolia: Architectural pieces (columns, capitals, reliefs) taken from older buildings and reused in new ones, as in many Early Christian basilicas and in the Arch of Constantine.
Springer (springers): The lowest voussoir of an arch, resting on the impost; also the stone at the foot of a vault from which several ribs spring together. See Springing, Impost.
Springing (springing line, springing point): The level at which an arch or vault begins to curve away from its vertical support; the springing line joins the two springing points. See Springer, Stilted arch.
Squinch (squinches, trompe): An arch, niche or small conical vault built diagonally across the upper corner of a square room, turning the square into an octagon so that a dome can be set on it. Characteristic of Persian, Armenian, some Byzantine and much Islamic architecture. See Pendentive, Dome.
Steel frame (steel skeleton, skeleton frame): A skeleton of steel columns and beams that carries all the loads of a building, the walls being mere cladding.
Stela (stelae, stele): An upright stone slab carved with images and inscriptions, set up as a monument. Maya stelae record the dates and deeds of rulers; Egyptian and Mesopotamian stelae carry decrees, laws and dedications.
Step rings: The series of stepped rings of masonry or concrete on the outside of the Pantheon’s dome, loading its haunches where the dome would otherwise tend to crack and spread. See Dome.
Stilted arch: An arch whose curve begins some distance above the impost, on vertical continuations of the jambs, so that its crown is raised. See Springing.
Stoa (stoai): A long Greek colonnaded hall, open along one side, framing an agora or sanctuary and sheltering shops, offices and people. See Agora.
Stomion: The deep doorway (literally “mouth”) leading from the dromos into the chamber of a tholos tomb, roofed by great lintels. See Dromos.
Stretcher (stretchers): A brick or stone laid with its length along the wall, so that its long side shows on the face. See Header.
Stroll garden (stroll gardens, kaiyū-shiki, kaiyu-shiki): A Japanese garden of the Edo period, kaiyū-shiki teien, in which a path leads round a large pond past a sequence of composed scenes, as at Katsura and Kenroku-en. See Shakkei.
Stupa (stupas, stūpa, dagoba, chedi): A Buddhist monument: a solid hemispherical mound enshrining relics, crowned by a harmika and parasols and worshipped by walking round it. See Anda, Harmika, Chattra.
Stupi (stūpi): The finial on the domed crown of a South Indian vimana.
Stylobate: The top step of a temple platform, on which the columns stand. See Crepidoma.
Sukiya (sukiya-zukuri): The refined, rustic style of the tea house and of residences influenced by it, using natural timbers, earthen walls and understated detail. See Shoin.
Systyle: An intercolumniation of two diameters. See Intercolumniation.
Taberna (tabernae): A Roman shop or workshop: a single room open to the street by a wide doorway, often with a mezzanine for living. See Insula, Domus.
Tablero (tableros): The vertical framed panel set above a talud in Mesoamerican platforms (Spanish, “board”); at Teotihuacan it projects over the slope beneath it. See Talud, Talud-tablero.
Tablinum: The room on the main axis of a Roman house between the atrium and the peristyle, open to both, where the master received visitors and kept the family records. See Atrium, Alae, Domus.
Taenia: The fillet that crowns a Doric architrave and separates it from the frieze. See Architrave.
Taihu stone (Taihu stones, Taihu rock, Taihu rocks, Lake Tai stone, scholar’s rock): A grey limestone from Lake Tai near Suzhou, eroded by water into holes, hollows and folds, prized in Chinese gardens as a mountain in miniature and judged by its thinness, channels, perforation and wrinkles. See Moon gate.
Taiji (platform (taiji)): The raised platform of rammed earth faced with brick or stone on which a Chinese building stands; its height and balustrades express rank. See Jian.
Tailiang (tai liang, raised-beam frame, raised beam): The raised-beam frame of northern China: beams stacked one above another, each shorter than the one below and raised on short posts, with purlins on their ends. It allows every purlin to be set at its own height. See Jǔzhé, Chuandou, Truss.
Taisha-zukuri (taisha zukuri, taisha): The shrine style of Izumo: a square hall of two by two bays on nine tall pillars, entered on the gable end by a covered stair through an off-centre door. See Shinmei-zukuri.
Tala (talas): A storey of a South Indian vimana; also a unit of proportion (the face-length) in the canons of sculpture.
Talud (taluds): The sloping lower element of a Mesoamerican platform terrace (Spanish, “slope”). See Tablero, Talud-tablero.
Talud-tablero: The profile of stepped platforms at Teotihuacan and in places under its influence: each stage a sloping talud surmounted by a framed vertical tablero. See Talud, Tablero.
Tapis vert (tapis verts): A green carpet: a long rectangular lawn on the axis of a French formal garden, such as the Allée royale at Versailles. See Allée.
Tatami (mat, mats, tatami mats): A floor mat of rush over a straw core, bound with cloth along its long edges, about one ken by half a ken; rooms are named by the number of mats they hold. See Ken, Shoin.
Temple-mountain (temple mountain, temple-mountains): A Khmer state temple built as a stepped pyramid carrying shrines on its summit, an image of Mount Meru. See Quincunx, Mount Meru.
Tensegrity: Buckminster Fuller’s word (tensional integrity) for a structure of isolated compression struts held in a continuous network of tension cables.
Tensile structure (tension structure, membrane structure): A structure (membrane, cable net or cable-stayed roof) whose main elements act in tension; it must be prestressed into a doubly curved shape to be stable. See Anticlastic.
Thatch (thatched, kaya): A roof covering of dried straw, reed, rush or grass laid thickly in overlapping bundles; it needs a steep pitch, about 45° or more, to shed water. See Pitch.
Thermae (baths, frigidarium, tepidarium, caldarium): The great public baths of imperial Rome, with a sequence of cold (frigidarium), warm (tepidarium) and hot (caldarium) rooms, sweating rooms, exercise courts and gardens, planned symmetrically and roofed with vaults and domes. See Hypocaust, Laconicum.
Thermal bridge (thermal bridges, cold bridge): A place where heat escapes through the insulation along a more conductive material, such as a steel beam or concrete balcony slab.
Thermal mass: The capacity of heavy materials such as concrete, masonry and earth to store heat and release it slowly, damping swings of temperature.
Tholos: A round building; in a temple, a circular cella surrounded by a ring of columns. See Monopteros.
Tholos tomb (tholos, beehive tomb): A Mycenaean “beehive” tomb: a circular chamber roofed by a corbelled dome, entered through a passage (dromos) and covered by an earth mound. See Dromos, Corbelled dome, Relieving triangle.
Thrust: The outward, horizontal push that an arch or vault exerts on its supports, in addition to its weight. The flatter the arch, the greater its thrust. See Abutment, Flying buttress.
Thrust line (line of thrust, thrust lines): The line along which compressive force passes through an arch or vault; the structure stands if a thrust line can be drawn within its thickness.
Tierceron (tiercerons, tierceron vault): A secondary rib rising from the springer to a point on the ridge rib, neither diagonal nor transverse. See Lierne, Ridge rib.
Tile-hanging (tile-hung, tile hanging): Clay tiles hung on battens on the face of a wall, usually an upper storey, to keep out the rain; traditional in the south-east of England and revived by the Queen Anne and Arts and Crafts architects. See Roughcast.
Tokonoma (toko, tokobashira): A shallow raised alcove in a Japanese reception room for a hanging scroll and flowers; the seat in front of it is the place of honour. Its side post is the tokobashira. See Shoin.
Tondo (tondi, roundel): A circular panel, painting or relief, such as the glazed terracotta roundels of infants on the Innocenti loggia.
Topiary (topiarist, clipped evergreens): The art of clipping evergreen shrubs and trees, chiefly box and yew, into geometric or figurative shapes; from the Latin topiarius, the gardener of a Roman villa. See Karikomi, Pleaching.
Torana (toranas): A gateway of two posts and one or more curved architraves; at Sanchi, four stand at the cardinal points of the railing round the stupa. See Vedika.
Torii (torī): The gateway of a Shintō precinct: two posts, a tie beam (nuki) and a top lintel (kasagi). The straight shinmei type and the curved myōjin type are the two main families. See Paifang.
Torus (tori): A large convex moulding of semicircular section, used especially in column bases. See Attic base.
Torus moulding (torus, torus roll): A convex roll, semicircular in section. In Egypt it runs up the corners of walls and pylons and along beneath the cavetto cornice, like a bound bundle of reeds. See Cavetto cornice.
Trace italienne (bastioned trace, star fort): The system of low, thick, bastioned fortifications developed in Italy after about 1500 to resist artillery, and spread across Europe. See Bastion.
Tracery: The ornamental stone ribwork in the upper part of a Gothic window, or applied as panelling to walls. See Plate tracery, Bar tracery, Mullion.
Transept (transepts): The arms of a cross-shaped church projecting north and south at the crossing. See Crossing.
Transom (transoms): A horizontal bar across a window. See Mullion.
Transverse arch (doubleau, transverse rib, transverse arches): An arch or rib spanning a vessel at right angles to its axis, dividing the vault into bays. See Wall rib.
Treillage (trellis, trelliswork): Trelliswork of thin laths of wood, painted, used in French and Dutch gardens for arbours, screens, pavilions and false perspectives. See Espalier.
Triclinium: The dining room of a Roman house, named after the three couches on which diners reclined; Vitruvius makes it twice as long as it is wide. See Domus.
Triforium (triforia): The middle storey of a Gothic nave, between arcade and clerestory: a narrow arcaded passage in the thickness of the wall, backed by the aisle roof. See Clerestory, Gallery.
Triglyph (triglyphs): A vertical block in a Doric frieze carved with two full vertical grooves and two half-grooves at its edges; one stands over every column and over the middle of every intercolumniation. Thought to recall the ends of timber beams. See Metope, Doric.
Trilithon (trilithons): Two upright stones carrying a third laid across their tops (Greek, “three stones”), as in the great horseshoe at Stonehenge: the simplest complete post-and-lintel frame. See Post-and-lintel, Lintel.
Triumphal arch: A free-standing monumental gateway celebrating a victory or an emperor, pierced by one or three arches, framed by columns and crowned by an attic bearing the inscription, as the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine. By extension, the great arch that frames the apse of a church. See Attic.
Trompe-l’oeil (trompe-l'oeil, trompe l’oeil): “Deceive the eye”: painting so realistic that it is taken for real objects or spaces, such as painted domes on flat ceilings. See Quadratura.
Truss (trusses, king post, king-post truss, queen post): A rigid triangulated frame; in a roof, a pair of rafters joined by a tie beam, often with a king post or queen posts, so that the rafters cannot spread. See Tailiang.
Tuscan: The plainest of the five orders: unfluted, with a simple base and capital; described by Vitruvius as Etruscan and codified by Serlio. See Order.
Tympanum (tympana): The field between the lintel of a doorway and the arch above it, the place of the great sculpted scenes of Romanesque and Gothic portals.
Universal space: Mies van der Rohe’s ideal of a single, column-free, flexible hall that can accommodate any use. See Open plan.
Urushringa (urushringas, uruśṛṅga): A subsidiary spire attached against the face of the main shikhara, as in the Sekhari temples of Khajuraho.
Usonian house (Usonian): Wright’s modest single-storey houses of 1936 onward: a masonry core, an open living space, floor heating, few materials and no attic or basement.
Vastu (vastu shastra, vāstu): Sanskrit for “site” or “dwelling”; the traditional science of architecture (vāstu-śāstra).
Vastu Purusha Mandala (Vastu-purusha-mandala, vāstupuruṣa-maṇḍala, mandala, Vastu Purusha): The squared diagram (of 64, 81 or other numbers of squares) on which Hindu temples, houses and towns are laid out, over which lies the Vāstupuruṣa, the being of the site. See Pada, Brahmasthana.
Vedika (vedikas, railing): A railing of posts, lens-shaped cross-bars and a coping enclosing a sacred place, in stone imitating timber. See Torana.
Veranda (verandah, verandas): A roofed, open-sided gallery along the front or sides of a house, on light posts; from India by way of the British colonies, and spread in America by A. J. Downing’s books. See Porch.
Vihara (viharas): A Buddhist monastery, typically a square hall surrounded by monks’ cells.
Villa (villas): A country house with its estate. In the Veneto of Palladio a villa was both a working farm and a retreat, the owner’s house flanked by barchesse. See Barchessa.
Vimana (vimanas, vimāna): In South India, the shrine and its pyramidal tower of storeys as a whole; in the treatises, any shrine building. See Tala, Gopuram.
Volute (volutes): A spiral scroll, the defining feature of the Ionic capital; smaller volutes (helices) appear on the Corinthian and large diagonal ones on the Composite. See Ionic, Helix.
Voussoir (voussoirs): One of the wedge-shaped stones of an arch, cut so that its joints point towards the centre (or centres) of the curve. See Keystone, Springer.
Wall rib (formeret, wall arch): The rib along the side wall of a vault bay, framing the clerestory window beneath it. See Transverse arch.
Wardian case (Wardian cases): A sealed glass case for growing and transporting plants, described by Nathaniel Ward in 1842, which allowed living plants to survive long sea voyages and made the work of the Victorian plant hunters possible. See Conservatory.
Wattle and daub: The infill of a timber-framed wall: a woven lattice of hazel or willow rods (the wattle) sprung between the timbers and plastered both sides with clay, dung and straw (the daub), then limewashed. See Half-timbering.
Web (webs, cell, cells, severy, severies, infill): The thin infilling of a rib vault between the ribs; each triangular section of it is a cell or severy. See Rib vault.
Wedding cake (Art Deco ziggurat, wedding-cake): The stepped, tiered profile of the 1920s New York skyscraper produced by the setback rules of the 1916 zoning law; also called the Art Deco ziggurat, after the stepped temple-towers of Mesopotamia. See Setback, Ziggurat.
Weep hole (weep holes, weep-hole): A small opening through a wall or terrace that lets water drain out of the core; the ziggurat of Ur has rows of them in its baked-brick casing.
Weight tower (weight towers, weight turret): In Ottoman mosques, a turret rising above a main pier to load it and steady the thrust of the dome.
Westwork (Westwerk): A monumental towered block at the west end of a Carolingian or Romanesque church, with an entrance hall below and a chapel or gallery above. See Crossing.
Whiplash (whiplash curve, whiplash line, Art Nouveau whiplash): The long, sinuous S-curve ending in a sharp snap or curl that is the signature line of Art Nouveau.
Winder (winders): A tapering step used where a stair turns, wider at one end than the other.
Wudian (wu dian, si’a, hipped roof (Chinese)): The hipped roof, with four slopes and a main ridge: the highest-ranking Chinese roof, reserved in Ming and Qing times for imperial halls and the greatest temples. Called si’a in the Song; Japanese yosemune. See Hip, Yosemune.
Xieshan (xie shan, jiuji, hip-and-gable, hip and gable, paljak): The hip-and-gable roof: a hipped lower part and a gabled upper part, with nine ridges in all (hence the Song name jiuji, “nine ridges”). Second in rank after the wudian; Japanese irimoya, Korean paljak. See Irimoya, Wudian.
Xuanshan (xuan shan, overhanging gable): The overhanging gable roof: a two-slope roof whose ends project beyond the gable walls, exposing purlin ends and bargeboards. See Yingshan, Gable.
Yashti (yasti): The mast or shaft rising from the harmika of a stupa, carrying the parasols.
Yingshan (ying shan, flush gable): The flush (“hard”) gable roof: a two-slope roof stopped by brick gable walls that rise to the roof surface, typical of northern Chinese houses. See Xuanshan, Siheyuan.
Yosemune (yosemune-zukuri): The Japanese hipped roof, four slopes and a ridge. See Wudian, Hip.
Zakomara (zakomary): In Russian church architecture, a semicircular gable at the top of a wall bay, following the curve of the barrel vault behind it. See Kokoshnik.
Zellige (zillij): Moroccan and Andalusian tile mosaic of small hand-cut glazed pieces fitted into geometric patterns.
Zhi (qi (zhi)): The spacer, 6 fen high and 4 wide, that fills the gap between two stacked bracket arms; a cai plus a zhi makes a full timber (zucai) of 21 fen. See Cai, Zucai.
Ziggurat (ziqqurat, ziggurats): A Mesopotamian temple tower: a solid stepped mass of mud brick, cased in baked brick, rising in stages to a shrine on its summit and climbed by stairs or ramps.
Zoning envelope (envelope, sky-exposure plane): The imaginary three-dimensional volume within which a zoning law allows a building to be built on a given lot; in New York after 1916, bounded by sloping planes from the street centre.
Zucai: A “full timber”: a cai plus a zhi, 21 fen high: the vertical step of each tier of a bracket set, and the height of some beams. See Cai, Zhi.