Architecture Glossary

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Q

Quadrangle – A rectangular courtyard enclosed by buildings on all sides and sometimes within a large building complex. The arrangement is often found in colleges and schools.

Holyrood Palace

Quadratura – ‘Trompe l’œil’ architectural painting of walls and ceilings. In the 17th and 18th Century it was frequently executed by travelling painters who specialized in it and were known as quadraturisti. Quadratura is the framing of the ceiling by painting illusory architectures. It is an elaborated painting technique based on perspective laws applied to a surface which is oblique to the viewer's position.

Plafond de l'église Saint Ignace Rome Andrea Pozzo 1691-1694

Quadrifrons – A four-arched structure, often placed by the ancient Romans at an intersection of right-angled thoroughfares. It was usually on a square plan.

Arch of Janus

Quadriga – A sculptured group of a chariot drawn by four horses, often used to crown a monument or façade.

Quadriga Brandenburg gate

Quarry or quarrel – A small, usually diamond-shaped pane, or a square one placed diagonally, with which medieval leaded windows were glazed. The term can also applied to any small quadrangular opening in the tracery of a window.

San Marco Dome mosaic

Quincunx – An arrangement of five verticals, with four at the angles of a rectangle and the fifth in the centre. The term is applied to a Christian (usually Byzantine) church on a cross-in-square plan with a central dome, four rectangular bays covered by barrel vaults and four smaller bays covered by domes at the angles of the cross.

The term is also applied to the decorated marble floor design carried out by the Cosmati – Roman marble workers in Rome during the 12th  and. 13th Centuries. These designs are found throughout central Italy dating from that time.

Quirk – A sharp V-shaped incision in a moulding and between moulding.

Quoins – The dressed stones at the corners of buildings, usually laid so that their faces are alternately large and small

Architecture Glossary

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