In architecture, a bay is the space between architectural elements, or a recess or compartment. The term bay comes from Old French baie, meaning an opening or hole.
In architecture, a bay is the space between architectural elements, or a recess or compartment. The term bay comes from Old French baie, meaning an opening or hole.
A timber roof truss is a structural framework of timbers designed to bridge the space above a room and to provide support for a roof. Trusses usually occur at regular intervals, linked by longitudinal timbers such as purlins. The space between each truss is known as a bay.
Rafters have a tendency to flatten under gravity, thrusting outwards on the walls. For larger spans and thinner walls, this can topple the walls. Pairs of opposing rafters were thus initially tied together by a horizontal tie beam, to form coupled rafters. But such roofs were structurally weak, and lacking any longitudinal support, they were prone to racking, a collapse resulting from horizontal movement. Timber roof trusses were a later, medieval development. A roof truss is cross-braced into a stable, rigid unit. Ideally, it balances all of the lateral forces against one another, and thrusts only directly downwards on the supporting walls. In practice, lateral forces may develop; for instance, due to wind, excessive flexibility of the truss, or constructions that do not accommodate small lateral movements of the ends of the truss.
Main hall or Main Temple is the building within a Japanese Buddhist monastery compound (garan) which enshrines the main object of veneration. Because the various denominations deliberately use different terms, this single English term translates several Japanese words, among them butsuden, butsu-dō, kondō, konpon-chūdō, and hondō. Hondō is its exact Japanese equivalent, while the others are more specialized words used by particular sects or for edifices having a particular structure.
A bay window is a window space projecting outward from the main walls of a building and forming a bay in a room. A bow window is a form of bay with a curve rather than angular facets; an oriel window is a bay window that does not touch the ground.
A window may be all three: projecting outward from the main fascia of a wall, curved in shape, and not reaching the ground. A bay window may be supported from the ground by a foundation, or in space by corbels, brackets, or cantilever.
A setback or step-back is a step-like form of a wall or other building frontage, also termed a recession or recessed story. Step-backs lower the building's center of mass, making it more stable. A setback as a minimum one-bay indent across all stories is called a recessed bay or recess and is the more common exterior form of an alcove.
Upper stories forming a step-back may form a belvedere – and in residential use are considered the penthouse. If part of the roof, then they are a loft or attic/garret.
The Wealden hall house is a type of vernacular medieval timber-framed hall house traditional in the south east of England. Typically built for a yeoman, it is most common in Kent (hence "Wealden" for the once densely forested Weald) and the east of Sussex but has also been built elsewhere. Kent has one of the highest concentrations of such surviving medieval timber-framed buildings in Europe.
The original floor plan usually had four bays with the two central ones forming the main hall open to the roof with the hearth in the middle and two doors to the outside at one end forming a cross passage. The open hearth was later moved towards the cross passage and became a fireplace with chimney, sometimes the chimney pile even blocking the cross passage, which had soon been screened off the main hall. Beyond the cross passage the outer bay at the "screens end" or "lower end" of the hall, usually contained two rooms commonly called buttery and pantry, while the rooms in the bay at the other end, the "upper end", were called parlours. The end bays each had an upper floor containing solars, which did not communicate with each other, as the hall rose to the rafters between them. The upper stories on both ends typically extended beyond the lower outer wall being jettied on at least one side of the building. As the main hall had no upper floor the outer wall ran straight up without jettying, and thus the central bays appeared recessed. The early buildings had thatched roofs and walls of wattle and daub often whitewashed. Later buildings would have a brick infilling between timbers, sometimes leading to a complete replacement of the outer walls of the basement with solid stone walls.
An embrasure (or crenel or crenelle; sometimes called gunhole in the domain of gunpowder-era architecture) is the opening in a battlement between two raised solid portions (merlons). Alternatively, an embrasure can be a space hollowed out throughout the thickness of a wall by the establishment of a bay. This term designates the internal part of this space, relative to the closing device, door or window. In fortification this refers to the outward splay of a window or of an arrowslit on the inside.
In ancient and medieval military engineering, embrasures were constructed in towers and walls. A loophole, arrow loop or arrowslit passes through a solid wall, and thus forms an embrasure of shooting, allowing archer or gunner weapons to be fired out from the fortification while the firer remains under cover.