Voussoirs, lunettes, oh my
Sunday, November 27th, 2011 at 10:38 amI love architectural words. Cornice, pediment, dado, spandrel, blind arch — house porn meets thesaurus porn. It’s fetishistic, like technobabble or car talk. And I get frustrated when I don’t know the term for some architectural item.
So I was happy to happen upon this page about architecture in Ontario. It has a lovely lot of building terms, with pictures of everything. Ever wonder what to call the doohickey at the bottom of the spring of an arch? It’s a kneestone (and who knew that that bit was called the spring?) The ornamental parapet-thing on the front of a building, hiding the roof? A fractable. I espcially like the word for a fancy, raised element (usually a doorway) on the facade of a building — frontispiece.
(I paused at the description of Brutalism as “attractive”. Breauty is in the eye of the beholder? Though the Brutalist house, surrounded by trees, is very nice, I think. It looks clean and relaxed, and natural, like an updated cave.)
November 27th, 2011 at 5:43 pm
Oh, useful! I don’t have a particular thing for architectural words, but I do love gorgeous buildings, and I get frustrated not knowing how to describe them… (And I get frustrated when reading a description of a building and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be picturing, b/c I have no idea what the writer is talking about…)
November 27th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
To be honest, I’d probably think twice about using the more unusual words, especially if they don’t really sound like the thing they look like (like ‘fractable’!) but there’s nothing like an elegant description of a building. I like not just the terms but the way they can be ‘built’, with the right verbs, into a little edifice of words, so that you can almost hear the bricks clicking together.