Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each feature by whether it belongs to a LONGITUDINAL or a CENTRAL plan.
Groups: Longitudinal · Central
- Movement is processional and directional
- An axis running from entrance to apse
- Radial symmetry about a single point
- Nave with side aisles and clerestory
- A dome over the crossing as the focus
- Used for baptisteries and burial chapels
Hints
- One plan moves you along an axis; the other holds you at a centre.
- Anything about procession belongs to the longitudinal column.
Show the answer
Longitudinal: An axis running from entrance to apse, Nave with side aisles and clerestory, Movement is processional and directional
Central: Radial symmetry about a single point, A dome over the crossing as the focus, Used for baptisteries and burial chapels
Why
The two plans are two answers to a question about what the building is for: moving a congregation towards a focus, or gathering it around one. That is why the liturgical argument and the geometrical argument could not be reconciled by design skill alone.
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.
- Complete the vocabulary of reading a building.
- How many orders did Renaissance theory canonise?
- Match each element of a basilican church to its position.
- Arrange these steps for describing an unfamiliar building, in the order that works.
- The orders specify only the shape of the column and its capital.