Architecture Glossary

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Skylight - A window set into a roof or ceiling to provide top-lighting.

Skycraper - A multi-storey building constructed on a steel skeleton, provided with high-speed electric elevators and combining extraordinary height with ordinary room-spaces such as would be used in low buildings.

Slate-hanging - A wall covering of overlapping rows of slates on a timber substructure.

Sleeper wall - An underground wall either supporting sleepers, or built between two piers, two walls, or a pier and wall, to prevent them from shifting. The foundation walls of an arcade between nave and aisle would thus be sleeper walls.

Slype - A covered way or passage, especially in a cathedral or monastic church, leading east from cloisters between transept and chapter-house.

Ireland monastic church

Socle - A base or pedestal.

Soffit - The underside of any architectural element, e.g. an intrados.

Soffit cusps - Cusps springing from the flat soffit or intrados of an arched head, and not from its chamfered sides or edges.

Solar - A private chamber on an upper floor of a medieval house, usually a bedroom or a living-room on the first floor adjoining the hall at the high-table end.

A medieval solar, preserved at Kentwell House in Suffolk.

Solarium - A sun terrace or loggia.

Solea - In a Early Christian or Byzantine church, a raised pathway projecting from the bema to the ambo.

Solomonic column - A spirally fluted or shaped column commonly called a ‘barley-sugar column’. Such column in St Peter’s, Rome, were traditionally believed to have come from Solomon’s temple, hence the name.

Sopraporta - A painting above the door of a room, usually framed in harmony with the door-case to form a decorative unit.

Emperor Justinian as lawgiver, sopraporta by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo Würzburg Residenz

Space-frame - is a truss-like, lightweight rigid structure constructed from interlocking struts in a geometric pattern. Space frames usually utilize a multidirectional span, and are often used to accomplish long spans with few supports. They derive their strength from the inherent rigidity of the triangular frame; flexing loads (bending moments) are transmitted as tension and compression loads along the length of each strut.

Span - The distance between the supports of an arch, beam or roof.

Spandrel - The triangular space between the side of an arch, the horizontal drawn from the level of its apex, and the vertical of its springing; also applied to the surface between two arches in an arcade, and the surface of a vault between adjacent ribs.

Spiral staircase - Staircase whose steps wind around a central, vertical axis.

Spire - A tall pyramidal, polygonal, or conical structure rising from a tower, turret, or roof (usually of a church) and terminating in a point. It can be of stone, or of timber covered with shingles, or lead. A broach spire is usually octagonal in plan, placed on a square tower and rising without an intermediate parapet. Each of the four angles of the tower not covered by the base of the spire is filled with an inclined mass of masonry or broach built into the oblique sides of the spire, carried up to a point, and covering a squinch. A broach spire is thus the interpretation of a lower-pitch pyramid with a much steeper octagon. A needle spire is a thin spire rising from the centre of a tower roof, well inside a parapet protecting a pathway upon which scaffolding could be erected for repairs.

Splay - A sloping chamfered surface cut into the walls. The term usually refers to the widening of doorways, windows, or other wall-opening by slating the sides.

Springing line - The level at which an arch springs from its supports. The bottom stone of the arch resting on the impost each side can thus be called a springer.

Spur - An ornament, usually of foliage, on the corner of a square plinth surmounted by a circular pier; also called a griffe.

Squinch - An arch, or a system of concentrically wider and gradually projecting arches, placed at the corners of a square base to act as the transition to a circular dome placed on the base.

Stringcourse - A continuous projecting horizontal band set in the surface of a wall and usually moulded.

Architecture Glossary

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