Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these steps for describing an unfamiliar building, in the order that works.
- Identify the type it belongs to
- Read the section for height and covering
- Read the plan for organisation and circulation
- Read the elevation for what it presents outward
- Name the deviations from the type
Hints
- Start with what kind of building it is.
- The deviations only make sense once the type is established.
Show the answer
- Identify the type it belongs to
- Read the plan for organisation and circulation
- Read the section for height and covering
- Read the elevation for what it presents outward
- Name the deviations from the type
Why
Beginning with the type and ending with the deviations is what turns description into analysis. Everything shared with the type is inherited; what is left over is the individual work, and that is where the argument of an art-historical account usually lives.
Practise Architecture II: Reading a Building
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Architecture II: Reading a Building
- Why did the orders survive the culture that produced them by two thousand years?
- Which are true of the central-plan church in Renaissance debate?
- An architectural type is a recurring spatial configuration rather than a fixed set of measurements. What…
- A plan is a horizontal cut through the building, so what is drawn solid is what the cut passes through.
- Sort each feature by whether it belongs to a LONGITUDINAL or a CENTRAL plan.
- Complete the vocabulary of reading a building.
- How many orders did Renaissance theory canonise?
- Match each element of a basilican church to its position.
- The orders specify only the shape of the column and its capital.