GLOSSARY OF WINDOW AND RELATED TERMS

‘Gauged’ in the sense of measured. The US spelling is ‘gage’, which applies also to the UK nautical word meaning the position of one vessel in relation to another and the wind; the Oxford English Dictionary describes the spelling ‘guage’ as ‘a mere blunder’. The example shown is a gauged flat arch (or straight arch), curved on plan.

Gibbs had travelled to Italy intending to become a priest, but turned instead to architecture after being driven out of his college by an over–zealous and tyrannical regime. He trained in Rome under Carlo Fontana, a leading Roman architect, and brought back to England with him a familiarity with Italian baroque that was unique among contemporary architects.

See also astragal.

This is what Richard Neve, in The City and Country Purchaser and Builder’s Dictionary, 1726, had to say on the subject: “Gothick, or Modern Architecture, is that which is far remov’d from the Manner and proportions of the Antique, having its Ornaments wild and chimerical, and its Profiles incorrect”. By 1749 Horace Walpole, 4^th Earl of Orford, man of letters, art historian, antiquarian and politician was remodelling his Twickenham villa, Strawberry Hill House in the Gothick style. T. H. White wrote in The Age of Scandal, 1950, that ‘the villa of Strawberry Hill, which he created, has been subjected to a certain amount of ill–natured fun, and, it might be added, to ill–informed fun, by the pomposity of architects. They say that it was not true Gothic, but bastard and degenerate. Walpole was one of the first people who paid attention to ‘Gothick’ architecture at all; it was not to be expected that he would understand its principles from the start. Nor did he intend the house to be taken seriously. It was a fantasy, half a joke; a fairy story in lath and plaster . . .’.

In the example shown each run of windows consists of four tripartite windows — groups of three spring tape balance operated sashes — sitting between iron structural supports.

Few if any examples exist other than in the mind of Joseph Gwilt, architect and writer, who in his An Encyclopaedia of Architecture (1842) writes ‘What are called Venetian windows are occasionally allowable, when so ranged and introduced so as not to interfere with the composition — a task often difficult to effect. They should not be much repeated, as in the front of Holkham, where they become actually DISGUSTING’ (author’s capitals). The tall semi–circular–headed windows are in fact too close together to allow for the insertion of useful windows, and so cannot have originally been conceived of as meriting the label ‘Venetian’. Perhaps Gwilt thought of the piers as blind windows purely for the purpose of making a derogatory remark, a circumstance unremarkable if true in an age noted for hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness.

The French ‘gu’ sound translates into the English ‘w’ (Guillaume = William), and the soft ‘ch’ becomes the hard ‘ck’, giving us, with a sounded ‘T’ — ‘wicket’. A word not much used, except by Evelyn Waugh, who found reasons to employ it in several of his novels in connection with the cinema and with railways — “The complexity of the situation was impressed on me when I attempted to buy my railway ticket from Dirediwa to Addis. I came to the guichet with a wallet full of lire and francs. The clerk informed me I must pay in thalers”. (Waugh in Abyssinia, 1936).