The language of architecture

terms from abacus to west tower. The speaker reads each term aloud in its original language.

Abacus: The square slab at the very top of a capital, which receives the entablature.

Acanthus: A Mediterranean plant with deeply lobed leaves. The leaves are the model for the ornament of the Corinthian capital and recur in decoration from antiquity to the 19th century.

Springing: The point at which an arch or vault begins to curve outwards from its support.

Arcade: A row of arches carried on piers or columns, either open or blind.

Architrave: The lowest part of the entablature in a classical order: the beam that rests directly on the capitals.

Atrium: A courtyard or light-filled hall at the centre of a building. In the Roman villa, the open room just inside the entrance; today often a glazed, top-lit court.

Balustrade: A railing of small turned posts, balusters, with a rail on top. Common on terraces, balconies and rooflines from the Renaissance onwards.

Basilica: A long building with a tall central nave and lower aisles, where the upper windows of the nave let in light. The Roman law courts became the model for Christian churches.

Entablature: In classical architecture, the horizontal section above the columns: architrave, frieze and cornice. The Swedish word, bjälklag, also means the load-bearing floor structure between two storeys.

Ribbon window: A long, horizontal band of windows running across the façade. Only possible once the wall no longer bears the load; one of Le Corbusier’s five points.

Brutalism: Post-war modernism with raw, unrendered concrete (French béton brut) and heavy, sculptural volumes.

Brise-soleil: Sun shading of fixed louvres or cells in front of the façade, typical of Le Corbusier and of modernism in hot countries.

Campanile: A free-standing bell tower beside a church, common in Italy. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is a campanile.

Deconstructivism: A movement from the 1980s with fragmented, skewed and seemingly unstable forms. Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid are counted among its architects.

Doric: The oldest and most austere Greek order: a sturdy fluted shaft without a base and a simple cushion-shaped capital.

Entasis: The slight swelling the Greeks gave to the column shaft so that it would not look sunken from a distance.

Façade: The outer wall of a building, especially the one that faces the street and is meant to be seen.

Pediment: A triangular or segmental gable over a portico, window or door. Also called the tympanum when the field itself is meant.

Frieze: The middle part of the entablature, often decorated with reliefs. More generally: a narrow decorated band along a wall.

Funkis: The everyday Swedish word for functionalism: white, smooth-walled houses with flat roofs and horizontal windows, from the 1930s.

Cornice: A projecting moulding that protects the façade from rain and marks a boundary, above all at the eaves.

Gesamtkunstwerk: A total work of art in which building, interior, furniture and art are designed as a whole. An ideal of Art Nouveau and National Romanticism.

Gotland church: Any of the ninety-odd medieval churches on Gotland, built of limestone between the 12th and 14th centuries and largely unaltered since.

Fieldstone: Natural granite or gneiss, often split. The building material of many medieval Swedish churches and castles.

Gustavian: Swedish neoclassicism in the time of Gustav III, roughly 1772–1810: light colours, straight lines and antique motifs.

Presbytery: The raised eastern part of a large church, where the high altar stands.

Ionic: A classical order with a slenderer shaft, a base and a capital with two scroll-shaped volutes.

Capital: The top of a column or pier, which transfers the load from the entablature to the shaft. Its form reveals the order.

Coffer: A sunken panel in a ceiling or vault, in a grid pattern. The dome of the Pantheon is coffered, which both decorates it and makes it lighter.

Column: A round load-bearing post with base, shaft and capital, following one of the classical orders. Compare pier.

Composite: A Roman order that combines Corinthian acanthus leaves with Ionic volutes.

Chancel: The part of the church where the altar stands, normally at the east end.

Corinthian: The richest Greek order: a slender shaft and a bell-shaped capital clad in acanthus leaves.

Crossing: The point where the nave and transept intersect, often beneath a tower or dome.

Groin vault: A vault formed where two barrel vaults intersect. With ribs along the diagonals it becomes a rib vault, the most important invention of Gothic.

Dome: A vault in the form of a hemisphere or similar, over a round or polygonal space.

Nave: The long western part of the church where the congregation sits, between the tower and the chancel.

Lantern: A small open or glazed structure on top of a dome or roof that lets in light and crowns the form.

Loggia: A room or gallery open to the outside through an arcade or colonnade, but set back into the building.

Mansard roof: A roof with a steep lower slope and a shallow upper one, making room for rooms in the attic. Named after François Mansart.

Million Programme: The Swedish parliament’s goal in 1965 to build a million homes in ten years. The goal was reached in 1974, but the suburban estates became controversial.

Central nave: The taller central part of a basilica’s nave, flanked by the aisles.

National Romanticism: A Nordic style of around 1900–1920 that sought a national form in native materials and medieval models: brick, stone, timber and steep roofs.

Oculus: A round opening in a roof or dome, like the Pantheon’s nine-metre-wide eye to the sky.

Palladianism: Architecture in the tradition of Andrea Palladio, with temple fronts on villas and strict symmetry. Prominent in England in the 18th century.

Pier: A vertical load-bearing support, often square or polygonal. More general than a column, which follows a classical order.

Pendentive: The spherical triangle that transfers a round dome onto a square space. Hagia Sophia is the great example.

Piano nobile: The principal floor of a palazzo, usually one flight up, with the highest ceilings and the finest window surrounds.

Pilaster: A flat, slightly projecting pier set in a wall, with base and capital. It articulates the façade without bearing any load.

Pilotis: Slender columns that lift a building off the ground, leaving the ground beneath free. One of Le Corbusier’s five points.

Portico: An open porch with columns and often a pediment in front of an entrance, like a temple front.

Postmodernism: A reaction against modernism from the 1960s onwards, with playful quotations from history, colour and symbolism.

Render: Mortar applied to a wall, both as protection and to give the façade a smooth or textured surface.

Avant-corps: A part of the façade that projects forward, often the centre or the corners, to break up a long front.

Rocaille: The asymmetrical, shell- and rock-like ornament that gave Rococo its name.

Rose window: A large round window with spoke-like or petal-like tracery, typical of Gothic façades and transepts.

Round arch: A semicircular arch. A hallmark of Roman antiquity, Romanesque and the Renaissance.

Rustication: Masonry with roughly dressed blocks or strongly emphasised joints, giving the ground floor a heavy, solid look. Often imitated in render.

Gable roof: A roof with two slopes meeting at a ridge. The most common roof form.

Sacristy: A room beside the chancel where the priest robes and where church silver and vestments are kept.

Säteri roof: A Swedish broken roof with a low, vertical band of small windows between the lower and upper slopes. Common on manor houses in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Sgraffito: Decoration scratched through several layers of differently coloured render.

Aisle: The lower vessels on either side of the central nave in a basilica, separated from it by piers or columns.

Vessel: An elongated space in a church, bounded by rows of piers or by walls. The Swedish word, skepp, comes from Latin navis, like ‘nave’.

Slurry paint: Paint made of water, flour, linseed oil and pigment. The red slurry paint from the Falun copper mine has given the Swedish countryside its colour.

Keystone: The topmost, wedge-shaped stone in an arch, or at the crossing of a rib vault, which locks the others in place.

Pointed arch: An arch of two circular segments meeting in a point. It directs the thrust more steeply downwards than the round arch and is the hallmark of Gothic.

Spire: The tall, pointed top of a tower.

Star vault: A late medieval vault in which extra ribs form a star pattern. Common in Swedish churches from the 15th century.

Frame: The load-bearing skeleton of a building: columns, beams and floor structures. When the frame bears the load, the walls do not have to.

Flying buttress: An arch that carries the lateral thrust of the vault over the aisle roof to a free-standing buttress. It makes the tall, glazed walls of Gothic possible.

Buttress: A massive pier or reinforcement on the outside of a wall that takes the thrust of vaults or a roof.

Stylobate: The top step of a Greek temple, on which the columns stand.

Brick: Fired clay formed into blocks. Used in Sweden since the 12th century, particularly in Skåne and the Mälaren valley, and the favourite material of National Romanticism.

Steeple: See spire. Gothic spires were meant to draw the eye towards heaven.

Timber building: The foundation of Swedish building: log houses of horizontal logs, later stud frames with weatherboarding. Today timber is returning in tall buildings of cross-laminated timber.

Barrel vault: A vault with a semicircular cross-section, like half a barrel. The vault of the Romans and of Romanesque.

Transept: The part of a cruciform church that runs across the nave near the chancel, giving the church its cross shape.

Tympanum: The framed field within a pediment or above a portal, often filled with sculpture.

Porch: The entrance room of a church, on Swedish country churches often on the south side. The Swedish name, vapenhus, means ‘weapon house’: by tradition, people left their weapons there.

Vault: A curved ceiling of stone, brick or concrete that supports itself through compression.

Hipped roof: A roof that slopes down on all four sides, including the short ends. The hip is the triangular roof surface on the short side.

String course: A horizontal moulding or band that marks the division between two storeys on a façade.

Volute: A scroll-shaped spiral, as on the Ionic capital or on Baroque façades.

West tower: A tower at the west end of a church, above the main entrance. Typical of Swedish country churches.

ABC town: A suburb planned for work (arbete), housing (bostad) and a centre (centrum) in the same place, so that it does not become a mere dormitory town. Vällingby (1954) is the model.

Neighbourhood unit: A post-war planning idea: a district small enough to grasp, with its own school, shops and community hall within walking distance.

Stone town: The closed blocks of stone and rendered buildings put up in city centres from the 1870s, under building regulations that required non-combustible materials.

Slab block: A narrow, elongated block of flats standing freely in parkland instead of in a closed block. Functionalism’s way of giving every flat light and air.

Free plan: When the frame bears the load, interior walls can be placed freely as needed. One of Le Corbusier’s five points.

Glass façade: A façade of glass hung on the outside of the frame, often called a curtain wall.

Mass timber: Building panels and beams made of glued timber laminations, strong enough for tall buildings. Sara Cultural Centre in Skellefteå is built this way.

High-tech: A movement from the 1970s that displays the structure, pipes and services on the outside, as at the Centre Pompidou.

Acroterion: A sculpture or ornament, often a palmette, crowning the apex and corners of the pediment on an ancient temple.

Triglyph: A block with three vertical bands in the Doric frieze, placed over each column and between them. Thought to imitate the ends of the wooden roof beams of earlier temples.

Metope: The almost square panel between two triglyphs in the Doric frieze, often with a relief. The metopes of the Parthenon show, among other things, battles between gods and giants and between Lapiths and centaurs.

Crepidoma: The stepped stone platform of a temple. The top step is called the stylobate.

Shaft: The long middle part of a column between base and capital, often fluted and tapering slightly towards the top.

Base: The foot of a column, with round tori and hollow mouldings, between the shaft and the floor. The Greek Doric column has no base.

Apse: A semicircular, often vaulted projection at the far east end behind the chancel.

Triforium: A narrow gallery or row of small arches in the wall of the central nave, between the arcade below and the clerestory windows above.

Clerestory: The upper part of the central nave wall, which rises above the aisle roofs and has windows. It lets light straight into the central nave. Also spelt clearstory.

Pinnacle: A small spire crowning a buttress. Its weight helps the buttress resist the lateral thrust of the vaults.

Dormer: A projection with its own small roof and window in a roof, giving light to the attic.

Window surround: The frame around a window in a façade, often with a small pediment or moulding above.

Balcony: A projecting platform with a railing in front of a door on an upper floor.

Portal: The main entrance of a building when it is marked out as something more than a door: with an arch, surround or sculpture.

Plinth: The lowest part of a façade, nearest the ground, often of stone and projecting slightly.