Richard Phené Spiers

“ MOULDINGS, the term in architecture for the decorative treatment given to projecting or receding features in stone, wood and other materials, by means of curved forms, whereby those features are accentuated and varied owing to the play of light and shade on the surfaces. The principal characteristics of all the European styles are to be found in the mouldings employed in them and in their ornamental decoration ”

“ An order in architecture consists of several parts, constructive in their origin, but, as employed afterwards, partly constructive and partly decorative; its principal features are the column, consisting of base (except in the Greek Doric order) , shaft and capital, and the entablature, subdivided into the architrave (the supporting member) , the frieze (the decorative member) and the cornice (the crowning and protecting member) . Two only of the orders were independently evolved, viz. the Doric in Greece and Magna Grecia, and the Ionic in Ionia. ”

“ The happiest combination of all, however, is perhaps the spire of St Mary's, Oxford, with three ranges of angle niche-groups set one behind the other, forming with the centre spire a magnificent cluster of spires; the niche gables and pinnacles are all enriched with crockets and the ball flower in the arch mouldings.
Reference has already been made to two of the French spires, at Chartres and St Denis; there is nothing like the diversity of design in France, however, when compared with those in England, and there are but few on the crossing of nave and transept ”

“ The time involved in the construction of such a memorial, and more especially that which would be required for its enrichment with sculpture, rendered it impossible that they should be set up on the occasion of the triumphal entry itself, and it is known that the arch of Titus was not erected till some time after his death by his successor Domitian. There is always some difficulty in deciding between triumphal and memorial arches, as they were virtually similar in design, equally enriched with sculpture, generally surmounted with a quadriga and statues, and as a rule were isolated structures. ”

“ In consequence of the great value of the sites on which they are sometimes built, to which must be added the cost of the houses pulled down to make way for them, the question of expense in material and rich decoration has not always been worth considering, so that frontages in stone, with the classic orders brought in with many varieties of design, have given the character of a palace to a structure in which none of the rooms exceeds the modest height of 10 ft. ”

“ Byzantine capitals are of endless variety; the Roman composite capital would seem to have been the favourite type they followed at first: subsequently, the block of stone was left rough as it came from the quarry, and the sculptor, set to carve it, evolved new types of design to his own fancy, so that one rarely meets with many repetitions of the same design. One of the most remarkable is the capital in which the leaves are carved as if blown by the wind ”

“ They, however, had no confidence in the arch, which, as the Hindu says, “never sleeps but is always tending to its own destruction,” so that the pointed arch, which had almost become the emblem of the Mahommedan religion, had to be dispensed with for the covered aisles which surrounded the great court, and in the triple entrance gateway the form of an arch only was retained, as it was constructed with horizontal courses of masonry for the haunches, and with long slabs of stone resting one against the other at the top. ”

“ The early Renaissance architects in France in some cases, and notably in the apsidal chapels of St Pierre at Caen (1520) , seemed to feel that the stained glass was too much cut up by the tracery and mullions, and omitted them altogether, trusting to the iron stanchions and cross-bars to carry their glass, so that a return was made to the simple semicircular-headed window of Roman times, retaining only the mouldings of the late Flamboyant period for the jambs and arch-moulds. ”

“ In those days, when any amount of labour could be obtained, even the erection of a temporary wall might have been less costly than the employment of timber, of which there was great scarcity.
The Assyrian tradition would seem to have descended first to the Parthian builders, who in the palace of El Hadr built semicircular arches with regular voussoirs decoratively treated. The Sassanians who followed them employed the elliptical or egg-shaped arch, of which the lower part was built in horizontal courses up to about one-third of the height, which lessened the span of the arched portion. ”

“ Vitruvius refers also to Greek houses thus built, and states that in the house of Mausolus, at Halicarnassus, the walls were of unburnt brick, and the plastering with which they were covered was so polished that they sparkled like glass. In Rome, however, he points out, such walls ought to be forbidden, as they are not fit to carry an upper storey, unless they are of great thickness, and as upper storeys become necessary in a crowded city such walls would occupy too much space. ”

“ Moslem women, as a rule, are expected to say their prayers at home, but in some few mosques they are admitted to one part specially screened off for them.
The earliest mosque erected was that at Mecca, which consisted of a great court, in the centre of which was the Kaʽba or Holy Stone. The court was surrounded with arcades, all of which constituted the prayer chamber, so that its plan is necessarily different to the normal type; the existing buildings date only from the first half of the 17th century, as the whole mosque was destroyed by a torrent in 1626. ”

“ In both the enriched ogee and the carved ovolo the design was never complete without the bead and reel underneath (figs. 20 and 21) , there being always two beads and four reels to each leaf or egg. When employed as the crowning moulding of an architrave, the ogee is always capped by a fillet; and the same applies to the cymatium of the cornice. When the ogee moulding was of small size and employed in a subordinate position, as is constantly done in Roman work, crowning the modillion or subdividing the fascia of the architrave, a simpler leaf pattern was employed. ”

“ ORIENTATION, the term in architecture given to the position of a building generally with reference to the points of the compass, and more especially (as the word implies) to that of the East. It would seem that some of the Egyptian temples were orientated in the direction of the sun or of some selected star, the exact position of which on some particular day would be an indication to the priest of the exact time of the year—a matter of great importance in an agricultural country, when the calendar was not known. ”

“ The employment of the two orders in Athens simultaneously, and sometimes in the same building, led to a reciprocal influence one on the other; in the Doric order to an increased refinement in the contour of its mouldings, in the Ionic order to greater severity in treatment, more particularly in the bedmould, the members of which were reduced in number and simplified, the dentil course (which in Ionia was a very important feature) being dispensed with in the temple on the Ilissus and in that of Nike Apteros, and employed only in the caryatid portico of the Erechtheum. ”

“ In the later styles the windows assume much greater importance, and in Gothic cathedrals almost govern the whole design. Already, however, in the earliest Byzantine church, Sta Sophia at Constantinople, the windows constituted one of the chief features of the church; the forty windows round the base of the cupola giving an exceptional lightness to the structure; besides, there are windows in the larger and smaller apses and the north and south walls. The windows in the latter, which are of great size, are subdivided by marble mullions with pierced lattices between of transparent marbles. ”

“ Of houses of large dimensions, which in France are termed hôtels, there are also many other fine examples, the best known of which are the hôtel de Jacques Cœur (see Plate II., fig. 7) , at Bourges, and the hôtel de Cluny at Paris (see Plate I., fig. 6) . In the 15th and 16th centuries in France, owing to the value of the sites in towns, the houses rose to many storeys, the upper of which were built in half-timber, sometimes projecting on corbels and richly carved; of these numerous examples exist at Rouen, Beauvais, Bayeux and other towns in Normandy and Brittany. ”

“ The columns of the Mycenae tombs are semi-detached only, and of very slender proportions, averaging 10 to 11 diameters in height; as isolated columns, therefore, they would have been incapable of carrying any weight, so that in the next examples known, those of the temple at Corinth, where the columns had to carry an entablature in stone supporting a stone ceiling over the peristyle, the relation of diameter to height is nearly one to four, so diffident were the Greek architects as to the bearing power of the stone. ”

“ Beyond the Mecca wall is the tomb of the founder, covered with an immense dome. The entrance doorway on the north-east side is over 80 ft. in height, its summit being decorated with stalactite vaults, one of the grandest features in Mahommedan architecture, only equalled by the magnificent portals of the mosques in India. The central square court, of moderate dimensions, with halls and great recesses, is followed in other examples in Cairo, among which the Tomb Mosque of Kait-Bey (c. A.D. 1470) is the most graceful (fig. 3) . ”

“ The four principal Classic mouldings, so far as their enrichment with carving is concerned, were the cyma-recta or cymatium; the cyma-reversa or ogee; the echinus or ovolo; and the torus. The cymatium was almost always decorated with a conventional treatment of the flower of the acanthus plant, known generally as the anthemion and sometimes as the honeysuckle; the finest example is that which is found in the cornice of the north doorway of the Erechtheum (fig. 16) . ”

“ CAPITAL (Lat. caput, head) , in architecture, the crowning member of the column, which projects on each side as it rises, in order to support the abacus and unite the square form of the latter with the circular shaft. The bulk of the capital may either be convex, as in the Doric capital; concave, as in the bell of the Corinthian capital; or bracketed out, as in the Ionic capital. These are the three principal types on which all capitals are based. The capitals of Greek, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders are given in the article Order. ”

“ The introduction of the purer Italian style into England in the 17th century created a great change in domestic architecture. Instead of the projecting wings and otherwise picturesque contour of the earlier work the houses were made square or rectangular on plan, in two or three storeys, crowned with a modillion cornice carrying a roof of red tiles ”

“ The prayer chamber is a lofty structure, quite unlike those of Egypt and Kairawan, with a dome 75 ft. in diameter and halls on each side divided into two aisles, each compartment being covered with a dome, in this respect also not following the early normal type, in which domes were only found over tombs. The mosques of Constantinople are all copies more or less of S. Sophia: they have courts in front with a range of arcades round, and the centre portion forms the prayer chamber, the side aisles serving as passages. ”

“ The architrave, frieze and cornice, are simple versions of the Doric, except that there are no triglyphs in the frieze.
The Doric Order.—In his Doric order Vignola has followed the Roman Doric order of the theatre of Marcellus, but he gives it a base consisting of an astragal and torus resting on a square plinth; in his shaft he copies the fluting (24 flutes) with the arris of the columns of the thermae of Diocletian; his capital, except the flowers decorating the necking and his entablature, are entirely taken from the theatre of Marcellus ”

“ Houses in stone from the 12th to the 16th century are found in Cologne, Metz, Trier, Hanover and Münster in Westphalia, where again there are whole streets remaining; and in brick at Rostock, Stralsund, Lübeck, Greifswald and Dantzig, forming a very remarkable series of 15th and 16th-century work.
Of half-timber work in Italy there are no examples, but sometimes (as at Bologna) the rooms of the upper floors are carried on arcades, and sometimes on corbels, as the casa dei Carracci in the same town. ”

“ DOOR (corresponding to the Gr. θύρα, Lat. fores or valvae; the English word, with other forms common in allied languages, comes from the same Indo-European stem as the Gr. θύρα and Lat. fores) , in architecture, the slab, flap or leaf forming the enclosure of a doorway (q.v.) , either in wood, metal or stone. ”

“ Dr Arthur Evans’s discoveries in the palace of Cnossus in Crete have shown that the earliest type of the Doric column (c. 1500 B.C.) is that painted in a fresco which represents the façades of three temples or shrines, the truth of this representation being borne out by actual remains in the palace; the columns were in timber, tapered from the top downwards, and were crowned by a projecting abacus supported by a large torus moulding, probably moulded in stucco. ”

“ The house of Livia on the Palatine Hill was in two storeys, and the decoration was of a much finer character than those of Pompeii; this house and the House of the Vestals might be taken as representative of the Roman house in Rome itself. In those built in colder climates, as in England and Germany, account has to be taken of the special provision required for warming the rooms by hypocausts, of which numerous examples have been found, with rich mosaic floors over them. ”

“ Germany and Spain have always followed in the wake of the French; and in Italy, where architects preferred to decorate their walls with frescoes, the light from stained glass interfered with their effect, so that there was no demand for huge windows or their subdivision with mullions. At the same time there are many beautiful examples of tracery in Italy, generally in marble, such as those of Giotto’s Campanile and the cathedral at Florence, in the Ducal and other palaces at Venice, and in the triforium arcades of Pisa and Siena cathedrals ”

“ In the north and west of England, where stone could be obtained at less cost than brick, and in the east of England, where brick, often imported from the Low Countries, was largely employed, the ordinary houses were built in those materials, and in consequence of their excellent construction many houses of the 16th and 17th centuries have remained in good preservation down to the present day ”

“ Those which are peculiar to England are the broach-spires, in which the four angles of the tower are covered with a stone roof which penetrates the central, octagonal spire. In the best examples the spire comes down on the tower with dripping eaves, and is carried on a corbel table, of which the finest solution is St Mary's at Stamford. The angles of the octagonal spire have a projecting moulding which is stopped by a head just above the corbel table, and at the top of the broach is a small niche with a figure in it ”

“ The stone staircase in the palace rising through two storeys shows that even at this early period the houses in towns had floors superposed one above the other; to a certain extent the same extension existed in the later Greek houses found in Delos, in two of which there was clear evidence of wooden staircases leading within to the roof or to an upper storey. The largest series hitherto discovered is that at Priene in Asia Minor, where the remains of some thirty examples were found, varying in dimensions, but all based on the same plan ”

“ In Egyptian architecture inclined planes took the place of stairs, as in the sloping corridors of the Great Pyramid, the descent leading to the temple of the Sphinx, and the approaches to the two temples of Deir el-Bahri, one of them the oldest temple found. ”

“ At the present day, when timber of all kinds is easily procurable, this temporary support is given by centring, consisting of a framed truss with semicircular or segmental head, which carries the voussoirs until the ring of the whole arch is completed and is then, with a barrel vault, shifted on to support other rings; in early times, and particularly in Chaldaea and Egypt, where timber was scarce, other means of support had to be contrived, and it would seem that it was only in Roman times that centring was regularly employed. ”

“ Early English porches are much longer, and in larger buildings frequently have rooms above; the gables are generally bold and high pitched. In larger buildings also, as at Wells, St Albans, &c., the interiors are as rich in design as the exteriors. Decorated and Perpendicular porches partake of much the same characteristics, the pitch of roof, mouldings, copings, battlements, &c., being, of course, influenced by the taste of the time. The later porches have rooms over them more frequently than in earlier times ”