Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
The diminution of the zigzag, as it gradually shares the defeat of the voussoir, and is at last overwhelmed by the complicated, railroad-like fluency of the later Gothic mouldings, is to me one of the saddest sights in the drama of architecture. § XV. One farther circumstance is deserving of especial note in Plate V., the greater depth of the voussoirs at the top of the arch.
LXX.; a rich group of deep lines, running concentrically with the arch, is the result on the instant, and the fate of the voussoirs is sealed.
The nave arches, therefore, are most usually treated by the chamfer, and the voussoirs are there defeated much sooner than by the shafted arrangements, which they resist, as we saw, in the south by color; and even in the north, though forced out of their own shape, they take that of birds' or monsters' heads, which for some time peck and pinch the rolls of the archivolt to their hearts' content; while the Norman zigzag ornament allies itself with them, each zigzag often restraining itself amicably between the joints of each voussoir in the ruder work, and even in the highly finished arches, distinctly presenting a concentric or sunlike arrangement of lines; so much so, as to prompt the conjecture, above stated, Chap.
As the builders get accustomed to the arch, and love it better, they cease to be ashamed of its structure: the voussoirs begin to show themselves confidently, and fight for precedence with the architrave lines; and there is an entanglement of the two structures, in consequence, like the circular and radiating lines of a cobweb, until at last the architrave lines get worsted, and driven away outside of the voussoirs; being permitted to stay at all only on condition of their dressing themselves in mediæval costume, as in the plate opposite.
We must also manage to discharge the load of the walls by means of archings composed of voussoirs with joints radiating to the centre.
The two rows of voussoirs that are in full view thrust against each other only by a single sharp edge; there is no keystone between them. Thus we find that only at each alternate vertical course was the arch of burnt and moulded brick complete.
But as this may perhaps throw the arch inconveniently high, or occasion a waste of voussoirs at the top, we may employ another expedient. § IV. I imagine the reader's common sense, if not his previous knowledge, will enable him to understand that if the arch at a, Plate III., burst in at the top, it must burst out at the sides.
In their disinclination to use stone voussoirs, the Assyrian builders here found themselves compelled to mould bricks of very complicated form, and the way in which they accomplished their task speaks volumes for their skill. Drain at Khorsabad, with pointed arch.
Its ellipse is composed of eight voussoirs, four on each side, and a key with a small wedge-shaped stone voussoir on each side of it. Between the two points shown in our Figs. 93 and 94 the upper and lower sewers have become one, the vaulted roof of the first and the paved floor of the second being continued in a single tunnel.
He made the general body of the arch an ellipse, 150 feet on the chord-line and 35 feet rise, while the voussoirs, or external archstones, being in the form of a segment, have the same chord, with only 13 feet rise. "This complex form," says Mr.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking