A fundamental shift in interest away from the simple, readily apparent contents and configurations of urban systems to their more constitutive but generally invisible dynamics. And it's dynamics that I want to talk about today. It is no secret that the field of architecture is full of jargon.
This can make reading about buildings or listening to an architect sometimes completely confusing. Those responsible for this jargon would tell you that architects have a certain expertise. and like doctors or scientists, they need to have a developed vocabulary for describing the spatial and composition principles that they're talking about.
So in this video, it's going to be an A to Z guide to the definitions as I understand them to the important words that architects use. Hey there, my name is Stuart Hicks. I'm an associate professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
I'm not going to waste a bunch of time here at the intro because we have a lot of words to get to. However, I do want to say that this list only includes one word per letter. That's only with a few exceptions.
And each word would probably spawn a ton of videos. So if any of these pique your interest, first, subscribe to the channel. Then let me know in the comments if there are some specific terms that you're really interested in having some more videos about.
But for now, let's get to the alphabet of architecture terms. A is for aesthetic. Aesthetic is a term that has one meaning in everyday use, but more a specific one within the architecture and artistic community.
When used outside of these specific contexts, I think that most people use it to mean a visual vibe of something. When used alone, as in, that is aesthetic, people are probably talking about vaporwave, the style of graphics made of the 1990s pixelated icons and swaths of pink and purple. Or people might say that something has an industrial aesthetic, meaning that it looks to be in the category of industrial-looking things. However, when architects say it, they tend to mean it to include all of the senses in how you perceive and experience a building. So if an architect is talking about an aesthetic experience, they mean what information your body is soaking in when we're experiencing a building or a space.
And this includes how it looks with our eyes, but also how it smells, how it sounds, etc. B is for buttress. The word buttress can be either a verb or a noun. To buttress something means to offer external support. But when used as a noun, the term describes a very specific kind of architectural element that offers structural support from the exterior of a building.
or adjacent to a structural member. An amazing invention of Gothic architecture is the flying buttress, which is basically a massive post in the ground that arches connect to to help transfer sideways loads to the ground. This is what allows cathedrals like the Notre Dame Cathedral to be so large and still appear so light on the interior. C is for circulation. The circulation of building is where the collection of spaces that allow for the flow of people to pass through.
These spaces are sometimes separated by another C word, corridors, or might happen through rooms that connect. The theorist and writer Robin Evans has a great essay which talks about how corridors came to be within English homes and how this corresponds with expectations of privacy and with intimacy within the domestic realm. The corridor makes for rooms separated by function and privacy.
Corridors might be also another C word, curvilinear, which describes a line with a smoothly curving shape. D is for diagrammatic. When something is diagrammatic, it means that it's simple, it's clear, it's irreducible, and it's singularly minded.
This could be used either positively or negatively, and in the 1950s it was negative and it used to describe simple buildings with functional layouts that are sprinkled with decoration. However, during the 1990s and the 2000s, diagram buildings were super popular. In buildings like the Toledo Glass Museum, it had a plan that was equivalent to extruding up a bubble diagram of functional programs. E is for enfilade.
Enfilade describes a series of rooms, usually in a line, and usually connected together directly without a separate hallway. This arrangement is especially useful for programs like a museum where galleries are connected in a succession and people can ramble through and spend time wherever they want to. F is for fenestration. Fenestration are openings in the facade and the word can also be used to include the pattern or composition of these openings. It's usually used to describe windows but I think it's a bit more broad than that because sometimes it might describe openings that don't necessarily have glass.
So if I say the fenestration in this building is beautiful I'm talking about the entire pattern of the windows. G is for geodesic. In geometry, a geodesic is commonly a curve representing in some sense the shortest path between two points on a surface.
The term was invented by Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes were a lifelong obsession for him. are hemispherical and thin shell structures based on a polyhedron. These triangular elements of the dome are rigid and distribute the structural forces throughout the structure, making the geodesic dome able to withstand very heavy loads for its very thin size. H is for hierarchy.
Hierarchy describes relationship between major and minor elements within a composition. When there is hierarchy there's a clear distinction between what's important or the elements that are important and which ones are less important. I is for iconic.
Iconic is another word that has everyday meanings and even multiple meanings within architecture. Iconic usually means in the kind of colloquial sense something famous or an important example. A building might be said to be iconic if it has a readily identifiable and distinguishable shape. So a building inside of the fabric, a normal building inside of New York maybe for instance, it wouldn't be iconic.
But maybe the Guggenheim Museum is. However there is a much more precise meaning which comes from the study of linguistics, where an icon is something that looks like something else. This might relate to how an icon works in graphic design, as you might know it. An icon of a man isn't really a man, but it sort of resembles one.
J is for Jam. Jam are the sides of doorways. These are really structurally important areas of the building because they transfer loads around the doorway and they provide the structural security for the door itself.
And they can be deepened to emphasize various effects or differences between spaces. Jam statues are carved figures, especially in cathedrals, as part of a portal or an entry sequence between the profane world outside and the sacred realm within. K is for Kitch. Kitsch comes from the art world and basically defines objects that are not high art, rather crafted low culture objects of questionable taste. In architecture, this usually describes another term, pastiche, which is like fake applied layers of decoration.
I think it also connotes that there's some sort of stylistic trickery with pastiche. Like the house looks like it's English Tudor, but the half timber framing is made out of plywood and it's just pastiche. L is for legibility.
Icons relate to legibility because of their shared roots and language. And legibility in architecture would be used to describe whether it's clear how and why a building design is the way it is. Or it could relate to wayfinding so that people know where they should go when they enter inside of a building.
People tend to appreciate these qualities in architecture and they tend to get frustrated quickly when things aren't very clear from the outset. M is for morphology. This word comes from biology and in that context refers to the study of the form of animals or plants. This is usually describing a deep and structural relationship within the animal rather than having just to do with the appearance.
So maybe like how a wing of a bat is similar in structure to a human hand, or an elephant foot is like a human foot on the inside of it, even though it doesn't look like it on the outside. In architecture there are deep structural formal relationships as well, like how rooms are arranged. or windows or a structure, and morphology refers to a precise way of categorizing and understanding these relationships.
N is for nodes, and nodes are junction points within a network. There's a genre of architecture called metabolism that looks at buildings like living networks with spines, and then nodes are the critical junctions of say the structure or the paths of movement. In a very influential book about how we live in cities, Kevin Lynch notes that nodes are a part of five elements that make a city memorable.
They are paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks. Nodes are strategic focus points for orientation in squares and junctions. O is for ornament.
Ornament is a term that architects use to describe elements of a building's design that provide a specific visual sensation. And in this way, it's like decoration. But decoration is always applied. While ornament might be something that is intrinsic to the building like the structure.
So the structure might be expressed on the interior for people to see and to understand, as well as create an ornamental effect. But it wouldn't be decoration. And Adolf Loos wrote a very widely read and commonly misunderstood essay called Ornament and Crime, where he made the association with tattoos and criminality. He thought that inventing new kinds of ornament as a modern human was a complete waste of time. P is for program.
The program of a building is like the program in a theater. It's a list of requirements written beforehand of all the spaces, their sizes, and the activities to take place in the building. However, the word is also used more generally to talk about the intended use or the function of spaces and the kinds of activities that will happen within them.
Q is for coin. This is the name for the block corners in certain buildings, especially those of Renaissance and Europe. And these offer heightened protection of the vulnerable corners, added with extra structural support where it is needed, and it provides a visual weight and stopping marker at a building's edges. R is for rustication. This is related to the previous word, but describes the intentional roughening of materials for use in a building, especially when they are located at the lower part of the facade, in order to add visual weight to the bottom of the building, connecting it with the ground.
Usually stones of, say, a Renaissance building would be cut roughly, and become more refined and thus visually lighter toward the top of the building. But even today, materials like concrete can be intentionally roughened to achieve various textures and effects on the exterior. S is for stereotomic. I chose this word because it pairs well with the next one.
But stereotomy is the craft of cutting solids into volumes. I often associate it with stone cutting, but the idea that there is a volume of some material and another volume is removed from it. There are specific techniques for this and ways of drawing this act, and these are all part of stereotomy. T is for tectonics, and tectonics describes how elements are brought together. like wood frames and how they come together in joints.
It might also broaden out to describe construction systems in general, but it also implies the way that a building expresses how it is constructed. It is a companion concept to stereotomy, which is about the volume and subtracting from it, whereas tectonics has to do with frames and surface layers being added together. U is for urbanism.
Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas such as towns and in cities, and how they interact with the built environment. I might also use the word to talk about the qualities of various cities as having one type of urbanism versus another type of urbanism. And this usually describes some deep way that the city works, like if it's on a grid or if it's composed of primarily low buildings or something like that. V is for Vernacular.
These are enduring architectural design solutions that develop in response to local conditions like climate, available materials, or cultural and historical traditions of a place. W is for Weathering. And it's the visual registration of time on a building.
This might include patina, which is a material's change in qualities due to age, like the green color that copper takes on. However, weathering can be used more broadly than that, as in the book on weathering, which talks about the full lives of buildings after they're constructed. X is for xylography.
X is a hard one. It's the art of making woodcuts or wood engravings, especially with the primitive techniques. However, contemporary methods might include CNC milling or using a computer to control a milling machine to carve away intricate patterns in relief. Y is for yurt. A traditional yurt is a portable round tent covered with skins or felt and used as a dwelling by some nomadic groups in Central Asia.
And finally we're at Z, which is for zebra. Just kidding, it's actually for zeitgeist. Zeitgeist describes the concept or ideas that are important at a given time in a given culture.
Zeitgeist is German and it translates to the spirit of the age. As in architecture with Stuart is in the contemporary zeitgeist. Boom!
26 architectural terms. I hope you find these helpful or interesting. I'm sure I also have all sorts of personal definitions in there, so please don't take this as some definitive list.
Instead, if you found some of these terms or concepts interesting, I hope that you feel empowered to investigate them further yourself. If there's a word that you'd like to discuss in the comments, I would totally welcome that too. And then after that, peruse some of the other videos that you might find interesting.
And finally, I want to thank everyone who supports these videos. I want to thank all of you for watching, and especially my amazing partner, Alison Neumeier, and my great friend, Jimenez Lai. Bye-bye, everyone.