STRUCTURES AND SPACES

 

TYPES OF BUILDINGS AND DWELLINGS

urban multistory dwelling typically of reddish brown sandstone and usually having front steps

brownstone

urban multistory dwelling typically with a facade of limestone and usually having front steps

greystone

outbuilding, originally for a horse-drawn carriage, typically converted for residential use

carriage house

small cottage or house of one story with no basement

bungalow

house whose rooms are at different one-, two-, or half-story levels (and built on slanted or hilly land)

split-level

luxurious one-family city house of several stories (and often of brick) and usually one of several in a row

town house

building or dwelling with a steeply triangular front and rear with walls reaching to the ground

A-frame

small rural or resort-area house

cottage, cabin

simple one-story dwelling built of logs

log cabin

large private dwelling (usually on spacious property)

mansion, estate, château, country house, palace, manor, manor house, family home, ancestral home, plantation, homestead, hacienda, demesne, stately home

pretentiously large, often shoddily constructed house in poor taste

McMansion

additional or minor building

outbuilding, outhouse

freestanding bell tower

campanile

grounds of a country house or mansion

demesne

primary house on an estate or plantation

great house

impressive public or private dwelling

palace, palazzo

round and often domed building

rotunda

farmhouse with outbuildings

grange

large farm for raising horses and/or other animals, esp. in the western U.S.

ranch, spread

large or impressive building or buildings

pile

dwelling raised, as protection against flooding, on a pile-supported platform near or over a body of water

stilt house, pile dwelling, palafitte

country estate or retreat

villa (Russia: dacha)

home of prebuilt sections or units

prefab, modular home, modular

tunnel-shaped prefabricated shelter of corrugated metal (and concrete floor)

Quonset hut, Nissen hut

house whose rooms lie in a line front to back

shotgun house

apartment extending from the front to the rear of a building

floor-through

poor or shabby dwelling

hut, shack, hovel, shanty, shed, hutch, cottage, cabin, crib

rudimentary platform shelter with a simple sloping roof

lean-to

house or apartment needing repair or renovation

fixer-upper

cabin with an open breezeway

dogtrot house

primitive (Eskimo) dome-like dwelling usually made of blocks of snow

igloo

primitive circular (Mongol) tent-like hut of hides with a conical top

yurt

primitive (Native American) conical animal-skin tent

tepee

primitive (Native American) matted oval or rounded hut of bark or hides

wigwam

primitive (Native American) tepee-like hut of brushwood or mats

wickiup

primitive (Native American) mud-covered log building of various shapes

hogan

communal terraced adobe (Native American) dwelling

pueblo

primitive (Native American) bark-and-wood communal dwelling of great length

longhouse

house with a widely overhanging roof as well as decoratively carved supports and balconies

chalet

house having a timber framework

frame house

house (with two entrances) designed vertically or horizontally for two families but having a common side wall and usually separate entrances

two-family house, duplex, semidetached

small house connected to an apartment building

maisonette

house similar to others in a development

tract house

house that is one of a continuous line of houses usually all of the same general appearance

row house

one-story house with a low-pitched roof

ranch house, ranch, rambler

house high up on a hill or mountain

aerie, eyrie

apartment above the ground floor in a building having no elevator

walk-up

apartment suite with connecting rooms on two floors

duplex apartment, maisonette

apartment with rooms in more or less a straight line

railroad flat, railroad apartment

roof-level or special (and usually luxurious) upper-level apartment

penthouse

apartment in a low-rise complex that has landscaped grounds

garden apartment

apartment with one main room (often with a high ceiling) but with kitchen and bathroom facilities

studio apartment, studio

small apartment (often furnished) with a bathroom and kitchenette

efficiency apartment, efficiency

building’s upper story converted for use as an artist’s studio or apartment

loft, atelier

temporary, secondary, or occasional lodgings

pied-à-terre

multiple dwellings

apartment house, tenement, residential building, high-rise, cooperative apartment house, co-op building, co-op, condominium, condo, multiple-unit dwelling

residential building of many stories in height and having elevators

high-rise

residential building of few stories in height

low-rise

structure where lodging and usually meals are provided

boardinghouse, guesthouse, pension, rooming house

overnight lodging place

hotel, motel, inn, hostelry, caravansary, lodge, bed-and-breakfast

cheap lodging place

hostel, flophouse, dosshouse, fleabag, cold-water flat

low-rent, usually urban apartment dwelling meeting at best minimum legal standards

tenement

establishment providing food and housing for people in need (or animals)

shelter

apartment house in which indigent tenants live in single rooms

SRO (single-room occupancy)

PARTS OR FEATURES OF BUILDINGS AND DWELLINGS

surface space occupied by a building

footprint

building plot or lot

plat

building’s upper or visible part

superstructure

building’s lower or unseen part

understructure

external supporting structure for a building

exoskeleton

section of or addition to a building often projecting laterally

wing, annex, pavilion

space or set of rooms between (horizontal) floor levels

story, storey

main story of a house

bel étage

ground floor

rez-de-chaussée

intermediary and often balcony-like story

mezzanine, entresol

supportive wall built to resist lateral pressure, as from advancing earth or water

retaining wall

protective cellar accessible in case of tornadoes or other violent weather

storm cellar

pit or cellar used to store root crops

root cellar

crude, shallow space beneath the first floor or the roof for access to plumbing

crawlspace

platform outside or around a house

deck

covered or arched and usually columned walkway open on at least one side

gallery, arcade, loggia, cloister

small or blind (decorative rather than structural) arcade

arcature

columns in a row and usually supporting a roof or wall

colonnade

colonnade encircling an open space or building

peristyle

roofed outdoor passageway between buildings

breezeway, (of a cabin) dogtrot

long walkway within a structure or between buildings

passageway

depressed open area at cellar or basement level

areaway

level space that encompasses a building site

parterre

central interior area or lobby with a high ceiling

rotunda

interior open space several stories high and usually having a skylight

atrium

roofed entrance structure

porch, portico, lanai

roofed and railinged platform fronting or around part of a house

porch, veranda

small porch or entrance stairway

stoop

screen-walled or roofed driveway (along a house entrance or to an interior courtyard) for vehicles

porte cochere, carriage porch

roofed, open-sided shelter for a motor vehicle or vehicles

carport

front wall

facade, face

protective or ornamental covering on the front of a building

facing

protective or ornamental covering on the side or sides of a building

siding

one of many floor- or ceiling-supporting parallel beams of wood, metal, or reinforced concrete

joist, rafter

projecting brace supporting a building externally

buttress

low protective wall along a roof or platform

parapet

defensive or decorative notched parapet topping a wall

battlement

building’s external angle or corner, or the stone forming it

quoin, cornerstone

triangular part of a roof’s end or building’s projection (sometimes with a window)

gable

above-the-roof gable with “steps” or setbacks

crowstep gable, corbiestep

structurally recessed or steplike feature of a building’s exterior, esp. of a skyscraper

setback

small sloping-roof or attic gable often with a window (all in all like a miniature house)

dormer

low or small dormer over which the roofing curves

eyebrow

horizontal structural supporting brace spanning a door or other opening

lintel

horizontal frame-like (and often decorative) projection all along the top of a wall

cornice

projecting block (one of many) beneath a cornice

dentil

part (lower) of roof overhanging the wall

eave

rounded vertical support

pillar, column

simple fluted column with no base and a saucer-shaped capital (simplest of the three orders of columns in classical Greek architecture)

Doric column

more refined fluted column with two opposed volutes in the capital (intermediate order of column in classical Greek architecture)

Ionic column

slender, finely fluted column with ornate capital of sculpted acanthus-leaves (most decorative order of column in classical Greek architecture)

Corinthian column

square or rectangular vertical support

pier

rectangular vertical support not freestanding but projecting from part of a wall

pilaster

scroll-like or spiral ornamental feature

volute

wall’s clamp-like support (beneath a roof or overhang)

bracket, corbel

ornamental scroll-like projection beneath a cornice

modillion

projecting curved or foliage-like ornament high up on a building

crocket

rounded (part of a sphere) rooftop structure

dome, cupola

rooftop structure for observation or decoration

cupola, lantern, belfry, belvedere

opening at the top of a dome

oculus

Russian-style (ogival) bulbous dome that comes to a point

onion dome, imperial dome, imperial roof

pointed tower-like construction rising from a roof

spire, flèche, steeple

small spire-like ornament topping a feature of a building

pinnacle, finial

octagonal spire

broach spire

topmost structure housing bells

bell tower, belfry

sculptural relief whose projection is slight

bas relief

triangular gable-like fronting of a classical roof (or an ornamental version of this)

pediment

crown-like upper end of a column, pier, or pilaster

capital

supporting block at the base of a column, pier, or pilaster

plinth

wedge-shaped piece at the top of an arch

keystone

wedge-shaped piece in an arch or vault

voussoir

ornamental part of a wall adjoining an arch or below an upper-level window

spandrel

decorative work

strapwork

carved or otherwise shaped or designed ornamentation

fretwork

any construction or feature pierced or perforated with openings in its design

openwork

decorative grating-like features or ornamentation

grille, grill, grillwork

decorative work with coiled forms

scrollwork

intricate or very fine ornamental pattern

filigree

circular or oval decorative element

medallion

decorative molding with a design alternating oval and arrow- or tongue-like figures

egg and dart

building features of iron or cast iron

ironwork

arched ceiling

vaulted ceiling

in a dwelling a high, often slanted ceiling like that of many a church

cathedral ceiling

ceiling with paint-on or spray-on spongy material to deaden sound

popcorn ceiling, acoustic ceiling

recessed or inverted ceiling

tray ceiling

concave ceiling edge, molding, or other architectural surface

cove

roof peaking at a high angle

steep-pitched roof

roof peaking at a low angle

low-pitched roof

conventional ridged roof with the same angle of slope on either side

gable roof, saddle roof, saddleback roof

roof with a third face sloping down before where the two main slopes meet

hip roof, hipped roof

roof having not one but two slopes (or angles of slope) on either side of its ridge

curb roof

roof only part of which is hipped (so that part of the main gable is “blunted” or truncated)

jerkinhead roof, hipped-gable roof

curb roof with the lower of its two slopes the steeper one

gambrel roof, mansard roof, dual-pitched roof

roof with four faces or slopes that rise to a point

pyramidal roof

roof with a single downward or upward slope

lean-to roof, shed roof, penthouse roof, half-gabled roof, pent roof

roof that is a double-gable or ridged roof (with the lowest part or “valley” in the center)

M roof

roof with broad parallel indentations across its top

saw-tooth roof

roof tiled in the southwestern U.S. style

Spanish-tiled roof, mission-tiled roof

raised construction with windows or louvers straddling the ridge of a roof

monitor

railed platform on a coastal house

widow’s walk

vertical post or support framing an opening such as a door or window

jamb, reveal

conventional wooden-frame (stile-and-rail) door with panels

panel door

conventional door without panels or moldings

flush door

door with some glass in its construction

sash door

slatted door

louvered door

slatted door on tracks that folds up or out horizontally

accordion door

door composed of glass panes (usually one of a pair)

French door, casement door

door of glass that opens or closes along horizontal tracks

sliding glass door

door with two sides that open or close

double door

door hinged to swing in or out

double-swing door

crude cellar or shed door

batten door

horizontally divided door with both the upper and the lower part separately able to open and close

dutch door

outer (second) door used as protection against inclement weather

storm door

paneling or other border-like features around a door

surround

design or arrangement of windows and doors in a structure

fenestration

framework with a pane or panes of glass in a window or door

sash

window that does not open

fixed window

standard window with raisable upper and lower sashes

double-hung window

window with a sash that moves right or left

sliding window

window that opens on hinges

casement window

pair of casement windows reaching to the floor and opening in the middle

French window

window with adjustable horizontal slat-like glass panes (or louvers)

jalousie

large fixed window dominating a room

picture window

window or windows projecting or curving outward from a wall

bay window

curved bay window

bow window

window above a door or other window

transom window

bay window supported by a bracket (corbel)

oriel

semicircular fixed window, above a door, like a fan (or half a lemon slice), with radiating muntins (sash bars)

fanlight, fan window

fixed fan-like window with muntins in the form of concentric semicircles

circle-head window

window with a sash sliding left or right

sliding window

window that (hinged at the top) opens out (sometimes with a crank mechanism)

awning window

window that (hinged at the top) opens in or is like an upside-down awning window

hopper window

window that (hinged at the top) opens in

basement transom window

window with a sash anchored at the center of the frame that swings around perpendicularly

center pivot window, pivot window

window in a ceiling or roof

skylight

window with small panes separated by lead

leaded window

window like an archway with a lower side-window on either side (the whole looking like the frontal outline of a domed building)

Palladian window, Diocletian window, Venetian window

tall and narrow pointed-arch window

lancet window

wall opening with (usually wooden) adjustable slats for ventilation

louver

small round opening or window

bull’s-eye, oeil-de-boeuf, oxeye, oculus

horizontal ledge or member beneath a window

sill

vertical dividing member in the middle of a window (particularly of a large Gothic window)

mullion

horizontal part of a classical building above the columns and below the eaves

entablature

part of an entablature resting directly on the capital over a column

architrave

sculptured or in-relief band along the top of a classical building

frieze

strip-like horizontal decorative feature around a room or along a wall

molding

decorative external horizontal band or molding

stringcourse

decoratively carved board along a projecting roof

bargeboard, vergeboard

molding between an internal wall and the ceiling

crown molding

wooden paneling applied to the lower part of an interior wall

wainscot, wainscoting

ROOMS AND INTERIOR SPACES

room in a house for the occupants’ social activities and leisure

living room, family room, parlor, great room

large formal room for receiving and entertaining guests

drawing room

entrance hall between the front door and a house’s interior

vestibule, hall, hallway, entry hall, foyer

outer room, often used as a waiting room

anteroom, antechamber

room in a usually rural house for occupants to remove muddy boots and wet or damp garments

mudroom

room or sleeping room for the use of young children

nursery

entrance room in a hotel, building, or headquarters

lobby

interior walkway or passage among rooms

corridor, hallway, hall, passageway

(chiefly British) one-room apartment serving as both a living room and a bedroom

bed-sitter, bed-sitting room, bed-sit

room, often book-lined, for studying, letter writing, or literary work

study

room in which books, video recordings or films, and other items are collected and arranged

library

somewhat private or secluded room for relaxation or informal pursuits

den

room or space just below the roof

attic, garret

spare room, usually without a closet, that can be used as a den, office, TV room, or any of various other purposes

bonus room

usually glass structure for the cultivation or display of special plants

greenhouse, conservatory, hothouse

compact, typically longitudinal kitchen (without a table) on a ship, train, or plane or its equivalent in an apartment or small house

galley kitchen, galley

room in a house, hotel, or other establishment in which meals are eaten

dining room

room, off a kitchen, for tableware, dishware, linens, and other items

pantry

small room near a kitchen for dishwashing and other meal-related chores

scullery

small area adjoining a kitchen for informal meals

dinette

glass or multi-windowed porch or room for enjoying maximum sunlight

sun porch, solarium, sun parlor, sunroom

space smaller than a conventional room

alcove, compartment, cubicle, niche, carrel

shaped, often vaselike supporting post or leg for a handrail or staircase

baluster

rail-topped row of vertical supports

balustrade

handrail

banister

vertical support for handrail at landing or at bottom of staircase

newel post

central vertical support from which the steps of a winding or circular staircase radiate

newel

COMMON CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS

earth and grass

sod, turf

poles with interwoven branches, reeds, twigs, or the like used in primitive dwellings

wattle

framework of woven rods, twigs, or the like plastered with clay

wattle and daub

straw, rushes, or the like used for roofing

thatch

lengths of unshaped timber

log

strips of wood used for flooring or, nailed, to reinforce siding boards

batten

bonding mixture (lime or cement or both with sand and water) used between stones or bricks

mortar

clay bricks, tiles, stones, or concrete or glass blocks usually bonded with mortar or cement

masonry

craft of construction through joining pieces of wood

joinery

pulverized clay and limestone mixture

cement, Portland cement

stone-like mixture of Portland cement with water and an aggregate (pebbles, shale, gravel, etc.)

concrete

concrete strengthened with embedded metal (usually steel) strands or mesh

reinforced concrete

translucent blocks used chiefly in walls

glass block

red brick

redbrick

glazed or baked brick

fired brick

bricks of sun-dried clay and straw

adobe, unfired brick

lime-water or other mixture used to whiten surfaces

whitewash

raw or unfinished pieces of stone

fieldstone

hewn or squared masonry stone

ashlar

broken stone

riprap, rubble, revetment

stone made (dressed) smooth

cut stone

burnt or baked thin or curved slab or various building materials used mostly for roofs

tile, tiling

fired waterproof ceramic clay used esp. ornamentally in roofing and facing

terra-cotta

mixture of gypsum or limestone with sand and water and sometimes hair used primarily for walls and ceilings

plaster

material of bonded wood fragments pressed into sheets

particle board, particleboard

boards of fiberboard, felt, or the like used in place of plaster

plasterboard, Sheetrock, drywall, gypsum board

covering or overlay of one material over another in a wall

cladding

weatherproof boards, sheets, or shingles used for the exposed facing of a frame building

siding

construction of siding using vertical wide boards and narrower strips

board-and-batten, board-and-batt

exterior plaster finish (usually of Portland cement and sand)

stucco

wall exterior of mortar and pressed-in pebbles

pebble-dash, rock-dash, roughcast

long and thin horizontal boards (with one edge thinner) used overlappingly with others for siding

clapboard, weatherboard

sawed thin oblongs of wood, slate, or other building material used overlappingly as roofing or siding

shingle

split-log shingles (commonly of cedar)

shake

polished mosaic or chip-like flooring usually of marble and stone

terrazzo

hard, slab-like stone whose flat pieces are used for a path or terrace

flagstone, flag

ridged steel rods used in reinforced concrete

rebar

EXTERIOR STRUCTURES AND OUTDOOR SPACES

ornamental garden with paths

parterre

garden decoratively interspersed with rocks

rock garden, rockery

platform-like and usually paved open recreational area alongside a house

terrace, patio

structure for swimming pool equipment near such a pool or a secondary dwelling near a pool

pool house

roofed, usually open structure in a garden or with a pleasant view

belvedere, gazebo, summerhouse, pavilion

walkway or arbor with vine-covered posts and trelliswork

pergola

beach or swimming pool shelter or hut

cabana

level open grassy or paved area for walking

esplanade

interior open area

courtyard, court, cloister

area designated to protect game or other wildlife or natural resources

preserve, reserve

federally designated tract of land, esp. one for Native American people

reservation

cultivated area of particular trees and shrubs designated for educational purposes

arboretum

garden, often with greenhouses, for the exhibition and study of selected or special plants

botanical garden

public walkway or area for strolling

promenade

extensive bridge-like walkway, between observation platforms, built high up in a canopy of tall trees, as in a rainforest

canopy walkway

communal square or park of grassy land in a town or city

green, common, commons

sizable open public space in a town or city

square, plaza, piazza

very small urban park or courtyard area, as between buildings and with benches and a fountain or artificial waterfall, for public relaxation

pocket park, vest-pocket park

grounds and buildings of a university, college, hospital, corporation, or other organization

campus

rectangular or square space surrounded by buildings, as on a college campus

quadrangle, quad

enclosed open space, as on religious property or near a cathedral

close

building or freestanding wall, using structural support and often hydroponics, covered with vegetation

green wall, vertical garden, living wall, biowall

roof covered with vegetation to absorb rainwater, filter air pollutants, and provide insulation

green roof, eco roof, living roof, vegetative roof, oikosteges

level area used for troop formations or recreationally

parade ground

COMMUNITIES WITH BUILDINGS AND DWELLINGS

publicly funded development usually for low-income families

housing project, housing development, projects

walled or fenced-in area of buildings

compound, enclave

group of similar or interrelated buildings

colony, complex, installation, facility, base

often rural settlement where residents have communal responsibilities

commune

collective farm in modern-day Israel

kibbutz

semi-communal settlement combining private housing and shared facilities

cohousing

temporary settlement for a particular group

camp, encampment

area of land apportioned or divided into lots for real estate development

subdivision

usually affluent, restricted residential complex with protected access by private security personnel and a gatehouse or barrier

gated community

area with impoverished residents and crudely built houses

shantytown, favela

ARCHITECTURAL STYLES

Greek Revival

Commonly classical-temple-like rectangular blocks with a full-width front or entry portico with rounded or square columns and a flat or low roof above a wide band of trim. Usually no arches, no roof balustrade, no dormers, and no wings or projections on the building. Front door usually surrounded by narrow sidelights. Windows are small and inconspicuous.

Gothic Revival

Church-like steeply pitched roofs and cross gables, pointed (Gothic) arches, and gables with decorative vergeboards. Sometimes flat roofs with castle-like parapets and usually a one-story full-width or entry porch. Structure basically of one color.

Romanesque Revival

This pre-Gothic style, based on medieval and Roman architecture, is characterized by thick walls and a generally massive look, simple and symmetrical floor plan, and above all the repetition of semicircular or rounded arches over doors and windows. Many examples are chiefly of brick.

High Victorian Gothic

An eclectic variation of Gothic Revival, differing in being of many colors (polychrome), having details that are heavy rather than delicate or fragile in appearance, and having many overhanging or “top-heavy” gables and towers.

Queen Anne

An asymmetrical hodgepodge style of house, usually with a preeminent front-facing gable, a steeply pitched but irregular roof with numerous gables or turrets, any kind of window except a pointed-arch one, and a porch that extends to at least one side wall. Upper stories commonly project over the lower ones.

Italian Villa

An asymmetrical dwelling, and a square or octagonal, off-center or corner tower is typical, as are eaves projecting considerably, roofs that are flat or not steep, a veranda, and windows grouped in twos or threes.

Second Empire

A high mansard (double-sloped on all sides) roof is the giveaway, as are varied dormer windows, chimneys, and ornamental brackets beneath the eaves. Sometimes there is a central cupola or off-center tower.

Colonial Revival

There are many subtypes, and roofs vary, but common to most examples is a prominent, pedimented front porch and door with columns or pilasters and a fanlight or sidelights. The double-hung windows have many panes. Most but by no means all houses have symmetrical facades.

Regency

A simple, informal variety of Colonial Revival, typically a symmetrical, white-painted-brick, two- or three-story house with a hip roof, double-hung windows (and shutters of the same size), and a chimney on one side; lacks the classical lines of the Georgian style.

Federal (Adam)

A semicircular fanlight over the front door and windows with small panes are characteristic. Decorative moldings usually highlight the cornice. The house is most commonly a simple box, but it may also have curved or polygonal projections at the side or rear.

Saltbox Colonial

A simple shingle or clapboard rectangular house with a steep, lean-to-like roof (showing no windows) extending far down its rear, and with a large central chimney. The double-hung windows are small-paned.

Dutch Colonial

A one-story (or, occasionally, one-and-a-half-story) dwelling with a side-gabled or side-gambreled roof that does not overhang far at the sides and small-paned double-hung windows. The entrance door is usually a two-halved Dutch door unless replaced by a conventional door, and often with an unsupported hood or roof over the entrance door.

Tudor

Usually a fortress-like stone-and-brick house with semi-hexagonal bays and turrets, high chimneys, tall leaded-glass casement windows (with stone mullions), and the well-known decorative half-timbering.

Spanish Colonial

Stucco-protected adobe brick or rubble stone is the distinctive material, and the flat or low-pitched red-tile roof is also distinctive. Small window openings have or originally had grilles and inside shutters. One or two stories. Elaborate ornamentation is sometimes found around openings, and a two-story building may have a pergola.

Mission

A stucco style, lacking the sculptural ornamentation of the Spanish Colonial, with balconies, towers or turrets, and tiled roofs being common. Eaves have a wide overhang, and square piers support porch roofs.

American Craftsman

Varied style of architecture, interior design, furniture, and so on (a British-inspired reaction against the dehumanizing structures of the Industrial Revolution and the opulent aesthetic of the Victorian Age), developed at the end of the nineteenth century and popular into the 1930s, created to serve and ennoble the American middle class with family-oriented structures—notably affordable bungalows—evincing simplicity of form, use of local materials, and palpably visible craftsmanship and decorative elements of woodwork as well as stained glass. Typified by an open floor plan, low-pitched roofs, prominently overhanging eaves, extensive porches, exposed beams and rafters, dormer windows, and exterior stone chimneys.

Prairie

Two-story dwellings with low, hipped roofs, widely overhanging eaves, one-story porches or wings, and no ornamentation—the emphasis or feeling being distinctly horizontal. The porch supports are often massive, and ribbon windows with dark-wood stripping are common.

Stick (Carpenter Gothic)

Accenting the vertical, these buildings have a steep gabled roof, large verandas, and boldly projecting eaves. The main and other gables often have near the top an ornamental truss. Other characteristics are vertical, horizontal, or diagonal stick-work (boards) overlaid on the wall surface, to suggest exposed structural framing, and gingerbread trim.

New England Farm House

A simple box-shaped house of (usually) white clapboard, with a steep-pitched roof and central chimney.

Cape Cod

A simple rectangular, one-and-one-half-story house of clapboard, shingles, brick, or other material, with a low central chimney and a steep, shingled roof.

Beaux-Arts

Double or coupled columns are the telltale feature of these imposing symmetrical buildings, which often have monumental (impressive) steps; wall surfaces with pilasters, columns, or decorative features; and sometimes sculpted classical figures at the top of the edifice.

Georgian Revival

Most commonly a boxlike house of one or two stories whose doors, windows, and chimney or chimneys are strictly symmetrical. The roof may have a centered gable or side gables or be either hipped or gambrel, but the cornice usually has a decorative molding of toothlike dentils. Usually a paneled front door framed by pilasters and an entablature. The double-hung windows usually have small panes and are always symmetrically positioned, never paired.

Shingle

The ground stories are sometimes of stones, but the upper stories are always clad in shingles. Roofs are often of the gambrel type with moderate steepness ending in a broad gable, and there are generally several chimneys, extensive porches, and multilevel eaves. The windows have small panes.

Modernistic

Sleekly asymmetrical. In the Art Moderne style, wall surfaces (usually of stucco) are smooth, and there is a generally horizontal emphasis accented by lines or grooves in the walls and horizontal balustrades. In the earlier and rarer Art Deco style, on the smooth stucco wall surfaces there are zigzag and other geometric designs and, above the roof line, tower-like projections.

International Style

Asymmetrical but unlike parts are carefully balanced. There is absolutely no ornamentation around walls or windows, with surfaces smooth and uniform and roofs flat. The windows, of the metal casement type, are flush or blended into the walls and sometimes “turn the corner.” Balconies and other projections are often cantilever supported.

Postmodern Style

An eclectic, late-twentieth-century reaction to the functional severity of modern (or International Style) architecture, an embracing of invention or fantasy, complexity, use of traditional materials, and allusions to or elements of previous historical styles and forms.

COMMON ARCHITECTURAL MODIFIERS

arranged or proportioned equivalently from the center

symmetrical

not symmetrical

asymmetrical, irregular

having a middle or central emphasis

centralized

configured like rays or spokes from a center

radial

standing alone or unsupported

freestanding

impressively broad and sizable

expansive, sweeping

very small

matchbox

irregular in layout or spread

rambling

thrust forward

projecting

constructed lower than surrounding floor levels

sunken

set back

recessed

being of the usual or typical style

vernacular

serving a single purpose without elaboration

functional, utilitarian

stately and sober in effect

formal

suggestive of a past style or nostalgically old-fashioned

retro

showing or using different elements or styles

eclectic

unoriginal, typical, or too much like others

cookie-cutter

imposingly massive or grandiose

monumental, grand, stately

suggestive of ancient Greece or Rome

classical, neoclassical

in three parts or divisions

tripartite

in four parts or divisions

quadripartite

in six parts or divisions

sexpartite

impressively bulky or dense in construction

massive

lengthened or notably long

elongated

curved or opening outward

flared

curved in a semicircular way

arched

arched and rounded

domed

stressing line or elongated contour

streamlined, sleek

relatively low or close to the ground

low slung

having different horizontal levels

terraced

paved with flagstones

flagged

seemingly shortened or cut off (at the top or an end)

truncated, stunted

relatively small and square

boxlike, boxy

extending around a corner or corners

wraparound

showing decorative features

ornamental, embellished

showing elaborately fanciful or ornate but superfluous ornamentation

gingerbread, wedding-cake

bearing shapes or decoration representing leaves

foliated

checkered or mosaic-like

tessellated

having a netlike pattern

reticulated

having sunken (usually) square or octagonal panels (lacunars or lacunaria) in the ceiling

coffered, lacunar

showing segments (as of a circle) as constructional pieces

segmental

having columns

columniated

having columnar grooves

fluted

without columns

astylar

having a colonnade

colonnaded

having a colonnade on all sides

peripteral, peristylar

having or painted in several colors

polychrome, multicolor

having stone rough-surfaced masonry whose edges or joints are accentuated (by beveling or rebating the blocks)

rusticated

consisting of or framed by exposed wooden beams

timbered

having a wall surface of wooden beams with masonry between them

half-timbered

sloping backward vertically or upward (as a wall)

battered

built or supported with horizontal beams

trabeated

projecting horizontally beyond its stabilizing or anchoring support

cantilevered

left visible although a supporting feature

exposed

arched or hollowed (as a ceiling)

vaulted

having a vaulted ceiling like a tunnel or half-cylinder

barrel-vaulted

having a ceiling of intersecting vaults

groin-vaulted

in disrepair, crumbling, or abandoned

dilapidated, ramshackle, rickety, tumbledown, disused, run down, derelict, squalid

painted as an architectural likeness so as to give the illusion of being real

trompe l’oeil

QUOTATIONS

Porto Vergogna was a tight cluster of a dozen old whitewashed houses, an abandoned chapel, and the town’s only commercial interest—the tiny hotel and café owned by Pasquale’s family—all huddled like a herd of sleeping goats in a crease in the sheer cliffs.

—JESS WALTER, Beautiful Ruins

To my left, on the right half of a broad wall, was an overwide pink door. It was from behind this portal, I was almost sure, that the laughter had come. I released the banister and staggered to a piece of wall next to the pink door. Leaning my head against the white plasterboard I heard another high-pitched laugh—a female exhortation of near hilarity.

—WALTER MOSELY, Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

Daily, I looked at houses to rent—shotgun cottages by the rail yards, ski chalets with circular fireplaces, and a house that was built under a small hill, for energy reasons. Finally I found one I liked, a cedar A-frame cabin with a wood stove and a sleeping loft and a flower box with marigolds.

—IAN FRAZIER, Great Plains

And there was his home, his very own box of miseries, neat, early Victorian, of gray London brick, with stone mullions on the downstairs windows and standing on its own patch of wintry garden with one bare birch and, to the side, an ancient apple tree.

—IAN MCEWAN, Solar

Three stories and an attic high, their house was imposing to her too, because, apart from the house her father had had many years before, she’d never really lived in a house. She faced it with a pointed solemnity, gazing up at the peak of the roof so mountainous above her as she turned up the short front walk. Flushed with excitement in the early autumn air, excited by gossip from her new friends and the prospect of this baby she was going to have, she stared up at the very top—the roof of dark green shingles, edged with moss in delicate patches, the great brick chimney soot-darkened and amazingly high, set off against the autumn air. The house itself was made of brick, darkened by time, but very sturdy and like a fortress, and its windows, set in their frames of painted wood, were enormous.

—JOYCE CAROL OATES, Them

The exteriors of most Puuc-style buildings are devoid of sculptural decoration below the medial molding, the intricate mosaics being concentrated in the upper half of the facades. The Palace of the Masks, however, stands on a low platform, the face of which is decorated with a single row of mask panels; above this is a carved molding, surmounted by the lower half of the facade, which is in turn composed of three rows of mask panels running across the front of the building. Above an elaborate medial molding there are again three rows of mask panels, the topmost being surmounted by a terminal molding.

—SYLVANUS G. MORLEY AND GEORGE W. BRAINERD, The Ancient Maya

When I’m walking its stone-cobbled streets, catching glimpses here and there of the bordering Tejo River, or taking in, from a vista on one of the city’s hills, the glorious staggered topography of the white buildings and their salmon-colored tile roofs, I feel that I’m also traveling some interior landscape, that those streets are leading to a place inside myself I haven’t yet located.

—PHILIP GRAHAM, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

The house he lived in was a nondescript affair called the San Bernardino Arms. It was an oblong three stories high, the back and sides of which were of plain, unpainted stucco, broken by even rows of unadorned windows. The facade was the color of diluted mustard and its windows, all double, were framed by pink Moorish columns which supported turnip-shaped lintels.

—NATHANAEL WEST, The Day of the Locust

In a rush, a high, the bus breaks out after three minutes into the esplanade des Invalides, the huge, flat, officially forbidden lawn—though, on a Wednesday afternoon, I once did see two brave and determined Americans playing Frisbee there (you could tell they were Americans because they looked thirty and were dressed like six-year-olds). The golden covered dome of the church stands straight up behind, not looming but preening, and the Invalides itself sits below, an old military hospital with the two horses incised on its front, combining splendor with the old barrackslike solidity, the bureaucratic confidence, of the architecture of the grand siècle.

—ADAM GOPNIK, Paris to the Moon

Yes, there it was, the Manderley I had expected, the Manderley of my picture post-card long ago. A thing of grace and beauty, exquisite and faultless, lovelier even than I had ever dreamed, built in its hollow of smooth grass-land and mossy lawns, the terraces sloping to the gardens, and the gardens to the sea.

—DAPHNE DU MAURIER, Rebecca

There was the road below the window, with its blueberry-blue tarmac, and, nearer in, a shiny black hump that was part of the roof of our car, and the single silver birch across the way, slim and shivery as a naked girl, and beyond all that the bay, pinched between the finger and thumb of its two piers, the north one and the south, and then the distant, paler azure of the sea, that at the invisible horizon became imperceptibly sky.

—JOHN BANVILLE, Ancient Light

The sweet old farmhouse burrowed into the upward slope of the land so deeply that you could enter either its bottom or middle floor at ground level. Its window trim was delicate and the lights in its sash were a bubbly amethyst.

—ERIC HODGINS, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

The detached houses were stuccoed and washed in shades of yellow, salmon, and blue. Some still had their pointed fifties roofs with decorative beams in the shape of a half sun; others had slate-clad loft extensions; one had been completely rebuilt in the style of a Swiss chalet.

—RACHEL JOYCE, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Yetta Zimmerman’s house may have been the most open-heartedly monochromatic structure in Brooklyn, if not in all of New York. A large rambling wood and stucco house of the nondescript variety erected, I should imagine, sometime before or just after the First World War, it would have faded into the homely homogeneity of other large nondescript dwellings that bordered on Prospect Park had it not been for its striking—its overwhelming—pinkness. From its second-floor dormers and cupolas to the frames of its basement-level windows the house was unrelievedly pink.

—WILLIAM STYRON, Sophie’s Choice

As if purposely living the cliché of a New York writer, I rented a cramped one-room studio, where I slept on a pullout sofa. The apartment, eerily quiet, overlooked the courtyard of several tenements, and I often awoke not to police sirens and grumbling garbage trucks but to the sound of a neighbor playing the accordion on his balcony.

—SUSANNAH CAHALAN, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Above the treetops, the structure raised, clear against the sky’s hot haze, a small dome. The dome was surmounted by a pillared cupola in whose round base four faces of the court-house clock were set. Crowning the cupola, stiffly poised on the summit, stood a bronze effigy—Justice. The copper carbonates of time had turned this effigy greenish-blue. The epicene figure’s verdigrised hands held the verdigrised sword and balance.

—JAMES GOULD COZZENS, By Love Possessed

But it will all be worth it, to get our house. It sounds, from Beth’s description, as though it has everything that I look for in a house: (1) a basketball hoop and (2) a fiberglass backboard. I understand it also has rooms.

—DAVE BARRY, “The House of the Seven Figures,” Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

We found ourselves in a vast patio or court, one hundred and fifty feet in length, and upwards of eighty feet in breadth, paved with white marble, and decorated at each end with light Moorish peristyles, one of which supported an elegant gallery of fretted architecture. Along the mouldings of the cornices and on various parts of the walls were escutcheons and ciphers, and cufic and Arabic characters in high relief, repeating the pious mottoes of the Moslem monarchs, the builders of the Alhambra, or extolling their grandeur and munificence.

—WASHINGTON IRVING, “The Alhambra,” Washington Irving: Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra

It had been handsome once, beneath the streaks of wiring and soot. I could even make out limestone and ironwork and some fancy nymphs. The balconies, it seems, had fallen off at about the time of Suez, followed shortly afterwards by the corbels and most of the shutters. The owner, Fumel, hardly seemed to notice.

—JOHN GIMLETTE, Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace

The private houses of long-dead bankers or shipowners, Gothic, Neo-classic or defiantly eclectic, stand on advantageous corners in glorious grandiloquence. Exercises in Art Nouveau, called here the Liberty Style, display gigantic bare-busted ladies guarding doorways or precariously ornamenting ledges. What’s this, now? A Roman amphitheatre. Who’s that? Verdi, composing, on a plinth in a garden. Which way are we going? Search me.

—JAN MORRIS, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Wigbaldy had begun by erecting single houses, mostly bungalows, on vacant street lots. Now he had acquired backing for a twenty-acre development of thirty or so medium-priced “homes” to be disposed with conscious rusticity among winding roads and named Green Knoll—though no relief of the flat terrain was apparent to justify this designation. The pilot house was up by early spring and was instantly furnished for display as a Model Home and thrown open for public inspection one Saturday morning.

—PETER DE VRIES, The Blood of the Lamb

The canopies over the many gas-pump islands were sleek stainless-steel ovals trimmed with neon tubing that, at night, would lend them a flying-saucer feel, and the pumps looked like platoons of robots at parade rest. The facade of the huge building was clad in stainless steel—probably a convincing plastic imitation of stainless—with the lines and the details of a classic Art Deco diner, but that didn’t give it the appeal its architect most likely intended; because of its size, the place had an ominous military quality, as if it must be the headquarters of the extraterrestrial overlord of an invading force from another planet.

—DEAN KOONTZ, Deeply Odd (Odd Thomas)

The sitting-room, beside it, was slightly larger, and they both commanded a row of tenements no less degenerate than Ransom’s own habitation—houses built forty years before, and already sere and superannuated. These were also painted red, and the bricks were accentuated by a white line; they were garnished, on the first floor, with balconies covered with small tin roofs, striped in different colours, and with an elaborate iron lattice-work, which gave them a repressive, cage-like appearance, and caused them slightly to resemble the little boxes for peeping unseen into the street, which are a feature of oriental towns.

—HENRY JAMES, The Bostonians

Whenever you turned at a road sign that had “Farm” in the title, you weren’t sure what you might find—a house that looked like a function center or a small castle or a Mediterranean villa—but you knew you wouldn’t find a farm.

—SARAH PAYNE STUART, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” The New Yorker, July 30, 2012

The Tassel House is not imposing (the facade measures 25 feet), but its design is characterized by a rhythmic fluidity which has a majesty of its own. The consoles flanking the entrance way support a corbeled loggia which links the ground and parlor floors. The completely glazed, curved bay window is supported by visible iron framework. The only ornamentation is the wrought-iron balustrade of the bay window.

—BERNARD CHAMPIGNEULLE, Art Nouveau

By way of recreation at the end of the day, he is looking into Katherine’s land holdings and judging what he can redistribute. Sir Nicholas Carew, who does not like him and does not like Anne, is amazed to receive from him a package of grants, including two fat Surrey manors to adjoin his existing holdings in the county.

—HILARY MANTEL, Wolf Hall

The entrance to this ancient place of devotion was under a very low round arch, ornamented by several courses of that zig-zag moulding, resembling sharks’ teeth, which appears so often in the more ancient Saxon architecture.

—SIR WALTER SCOTT, Ivanhoe

Crispin’s magnetic personality and Joely’s natural charm attracted other political drifters, and soon they had become a commune of twenty-five (plus ten cats, fourteen dogs, a garden full of wild rabbits, a sheep, two pigs, and a family of foxes) living and working from a Brixton bedsit that backed on to a large expanse of unused allotment.

—ZADIE SMITH, White Teeth

Yet we knew another New Orleans existed. We saw that when we piled into my mother’s car and rode past the red brick projects scattered through New Orleans, two-story buildings with sagging iron balconies, massive old trees standing like sentinels at each side of the buildings, women gesticulating and scratching their heads, small dark children playing angrily, happily, sulking on the broken sidewalks. I eyed the young men through the car window. Men in sagging pants with their heads bent together, murmuring, ducking into corner stores that sold POBOYS SHRIMP OYSTER. I wondered what the men were talking about. I wondered who they were. I wondered what their lives were like. I wondered if they were murderers.

—JESMYN WARD, Men We Reaped: A Memoir

The lodge, unlike the castle, had been built in an age in which symmetry was regarded as the only means to elegance, and it consisted of four diminutive rooms, each in a kind of pygmy Gothic, disposed two on one and two on the other side of the drive.

—MICHAEL INNES, Lord Mullion’s Secret

Brunelleschi’s magnificent cupola on the Duomo, the city’s vast cathedral—the first large dome constructed since Roman antiquity and to this day the principal feature of the city’s skyline—did not yet exist, nor did his elegantly arched loggia of the Foundling Hospital or his other projects carefully constructed on principles derived from antiquity. The cathedral’s baptistery lacked the famous classicizing doors designed by Ghiberti, and the Church of S. Maria Novella was without Leon Battista Alberti’s harmonious, gracefully symmetrical facade. The architect Michelozzi had not designed the beautiful, austere buildings for the Convent of San Marco. The wealthiest families of the city—the Medici, the Pitti, the Rucelli—had not yet built their grand palaces, whose columns, arches, and carved capitals conspicuously emphasize classical order and proportion.

—STEPHEN GREENBLATT, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Stretching out of sight on either side of the road were identical semidetached houses, each with a path running down the side. They might, she thought, be architecturally undistinguished, but at least they were on a human scale. The gates and railings had been removed and the front gardens were bounded with low brick walls. The front bay windows were square and turreted, a long vista of ramparted respectability.

—P. D. JAMES, Innocent Blood

It is an impressive house—not a true mansion, like the one Isaac de Pinto built for himself across the street, but even so it is a stately place. The three-story facade is made of brick with inlaid stone. It is quite wide, thirty-two feet across. Its tall front windows are topped by half-moon arcs of brick and stone. Above the roofline rise two thin dormer windows, each with a beam and pulley-hook sticking straight out into the street. The only way to move things to the upper floors of these narrow Dutch houses is to hoist them up and through the windows. In the center above the uppermost row of windows, crowning it all, is a decorative stone relief.

—STEVEN NADLER, Rembrandt’s Jews

The house itself looked, more than anything else, like an English country house. Family descended from the Normans. There was an enormous terrace skirting the tall square fieldstone house with a mansard roof. At each corner there were small round towers with tall narrow windows in them.

—ROBERT B. PARKER, A Catskill Eagle

Spanish Harlem was worthless property in the seventies and early eighties. Many property owners burned their own buildings down and handed the new immigrants a neighborhood filled with hollow walls and vacant lots. Urban Swiss cheese. The city would then place many of us in the projects, creating Latino reservations.

—ERNESTO QUIÑONEZ, Chango’s Fire

I found the place within a couple of minutes: a big, old, twenties Victorian with a lot of gingerbread trim on the front porch and windows that had leaded-glass borders.

—BILL PRONZINI, Bindlestiff

As the cave became important, the village built a portico to define the entrance, and over the next three centuries the cave was expanded by sacred spaces of advancing size, chronologically growing through several styles into a hexagonal dome terminating in an unusual nineteenth-century forecourt portico.

—HAL BOX, Think Like an Architect

Compared to the Whiting mansion in town, the house Charles Beaumont Whiting built a decade after his return to Maine was modest. By every other standard of Empire Falls, where most single-family homes cost well under seventy-five thousand dollars, his was palatial, with five bedrooms, five full baths, and a detached artist’s studio. C. B. Whiting had spent several formative years in old Mexico, and the house he built, appearances be damned, was a mission-style hacienda. He even had the bricks specially textured and painted tan to resemble adobe. A damn-fool house to build in central Maine, people said, though they didn’t say it to him.

—RICHARD RUSSO, Empire Falls

It was the damndest-looking house I ever saw. It was a square gray box three stories high, with a mansard roof, steeply sloped and broken by twenty or thirty double dormer windows with a lot of wedding cake decoration around them and between them. The entrance had double stone pillars on each side but the cream of the joint was an outside spiral staircase with a stone railing, topped by a tower room from which there must have been a view the whole length of the lake.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Long Goodbye

When Michael and Christine bought the house on Hazelhurst Drive, in 1985, northwest Austin had not yet been bisected by toll roads or swallowed up by miles of unbroken suburban sprawl. The real estate busts had brought construction to a standstill, and the half-built subdivision where they lived, east of Lake Travis, was a patchwork of new homes and uncleared, densely wooded lots.

—PAMELA COLLOFF, “The Innocent Man, Part One,” Texas Monthly, November 2012

Because it was a remnant, soon to be swept away, it was greatly favored by railway buffs. Their interest always seemed to me worse than indecent and their joy-riding a mild form of necrophilia. They were on board getting their last looks at the old stations, photographing the fluting and floriation, the pediments and bargeboards and pilasters, the valencing on the wooden awnings, the strapwork, and—in architecture every brick has a different name—the quoins.

—PAUL THEROUX, The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

The apartments which Alexander has taken for himself are made up of a string of first- and second-floor chambers at the corner of the existing palace, alongside a blunt, workmanlike new tower, mostly built, save for its crenellated battlements. When finished, there will be both intimate and public spaces.

—SARAH DUNANT, Blood and Beauty: The Borgias

Everything about the front was irregular, but with an irregularity unfamiliar to him. The shuttered windows were very tall and narrow, and narrow too the balconies, which projected at odd angles, supported by ornate wooden brackets. One corner of the house rose into a tower with a high shingled roof, and arched windows which seemed to simulate the openings in a belfry. A sort of sloping roof over the front door also rested on elaborately ornamented brackets, and on each side of the steps was a large urn of fluted iron painted to imitate stone, in which some half-dead geraniums languished.

—EDITH WHARTON, Hudson River Bracketed

I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a perpetual yesterday for us. It was the size of a small room, the mud room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other.

—ALICE SEBOLD, The Lovely Bones

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house. Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot. The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it. Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away.

—HARPER LEE, To Kill a Mockingbird

Fashionable districts developed along High and State Streets, and a new Capitol, nearly as big as the United States Capitol, opened its doors in January 1857. Built in Greek Revival style, with tall Doric columns defining each of the entrances and a large cupola on top, the magnificent structure, which housed the governor’s office as well as the legislative chambers, was proclaimed to be “the greatest State capitol building” in the country.

—DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

There was a drive, always covered with gravel, that swept around in a beautiful curve and brought you up under a big porte-cochere, which reminded you of horses with fly-nets, and shiny and black closed carriages; and the house, which was yellow and covered with shingles that overlapped with rounded ends like scales, was an impressive though rather formless mass of cupolas with foolscap tops, dormers with diamond panes, balconies with little white railings and porches with Ionic columns, all pointing in different directions.

—EDMUND WILSON, Memoirs of Hecate County

Duke reached beneath his seat and nipped from the flask. He followed the canal, the engine humming in his ears. The shantytown spread across an acre of raw black earth along the water’s banks. He made his way down toward the sheet-iron houses and canvas canopies. The fire pits were still smoldering from the night before, and all through the camp, he could see braids of smoke washing skyward.

—BILL CHENG, Southern Cross the Dog

Ocean Street is five minutes from the motel, an extension of Sea Street, profuse with weathered shingles and blue shutters. Shepard’s house was no exception. A big Colonial with white cedar shingles weathered silver, and blue shutters at all the windows. It was on a slight rise of ground on the ocean side of Ocean Street.

—ROBERT B. PARKER, Promised Land

Drewsboro owed something to the stylish houses my mother had seen in America. There were ornamental piers on the gateway, bay windows and a tiled porch that was called a vestibule opening into a tiled hallway. No other house around there had bay windows or a vestibule. The lawn had many trees, not planted in succession as in a demesne, but each tree in its own massive empire, leaves stirring and drowsing in summer and in winter, the boughs groaning and creaking, as if they were about to expire.

—EDNA O’BRIEN, Country Girl: A Memoir

The university capped a then bleak hill, its buildings evoking the cultural aspirations of a faraway Europe of a distant past. The centerpiece was the baroque Hall of Languages, built of stones of two colors and partly covered with ivy. Behind it, a bit to the west, stood the gymnasium, as Gothic as a temple of sweat could hope to be, of dark brick, with high windows. Also to the west was the university library, later to become the administration building. Farther still to the west and south, on another rise overlooking the city, was the dark Gothic cathedral-like spire of Crouse College, in which Fine Arts were housed. Wooden walkways, some of them dilapidated, ran between these buildings.

—JOHN HERSEY, The Call: An American Missionary in China

My father was all but undone by my mother’s death. In the evening after supper he walked the floor and I walked with him, with my arm around his waist. I was ten years old. He would walk from the living room into the front hall, then, turning, past the grandfather’s clock and on into the library, and from the library into the living room. Or he would walk from the library into the dining room and then into the living room by another doorway, and back to the front hall. Because he didn’t say anything, I didn’t either. I only tried to sense, as he was about to turn, which room he was going to next so we wouldn’t bump into each other.

—WILLIAM MAXWELL, So Long, See You Tomorrow

It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland. Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock. To me it has an underwater look—that barnacled silveriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light.

—WALLACE STEGNER, All the Little Live Things

But constructing a riprap river wall and leveling the flinty rock surface to lay gradeless track was an engineering challenge, not an operating one, and within two years the trains were running north past Peekskill from a terminal at West 32nd Street and Ninth Avenue (a route that would extend downtown to Chambers Street on Ninth Avenue, paralleling in some places the former elevated freight tracks that were transformed into what is now the High Line park).

—SAM ROBERTS, Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America

At the far end of a scrubby courtyard was a sooty brick building, the shape of Monticello on the back of the nickel, a domed roof but with one difference: this one had a chimney at the rear belching greasy smoke. It was too squat, too plain, too gloomy for a church.

—PAUL THEROUX, “A Real Russian Ikon,” Commentary, December 1969

The outlines of the house of Dr. Trescott had faded quietly into the evening, hiding a shape such as we call Queen Anne against the pall of the blackened sky. The neighborhood was at this time so quiet, and seemed so devoid of obstructions, that Hannigan’s dog thought it a good opportunity to prowl in forbidden precincts, and so came and pawed Trescott’s lawn, growling, and considering himself a formidable beast. Later, Peter Washington strolled past the house and whistled, but there was no dim light shining from Henry’s loft, and presently Peter went his way.

—STEPHEN CRANE, “The Monster,” The Monster and Other Stories

It was a Gothic Revival eyesore of decaying brick, flaking paint, and narrow windows, with spiky gables that gave it a menacing upward thrust—a vulgar aberration on a street lined with square-built structures that were fully restored. In place of the front porch there was a ladder to be climbed, and in the entrance hall a massive chandelier lay on its side. The front room, a vaultlike space with an implausibly high ceiling, featured heaps of rubble and dangling wires.

—A. S. A. HARRISON, The Silent Wife

The houses on either side were high and large, but very old; and tenanted by people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies half doubled, occasionally skulked along. A great many of the tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed and mouldering away: only the upper rooms being inhabited. Some houses which had become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into the street, by huge beams of wood reared against the walls, and firmly planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches; for many of the rough boards, which supplied the place of door and window, were wrenched from their positions, to afford an aperture wide enough for the passage of a human body.

—CHARLES DICKENS, Oliver Twist

A badge of grass, a green brooch pinned at the collarbone of a mountain to a vast black cloak of fir trees. At the center of the clearing, a handful of buildings clad in brown shakes radiate from a circular fountain, linked by paths and separated by quilted patches of lawn and gravel.

—MICHAEL CHABON, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

She was right about the guest house: it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. It was stubby and ill-proportioned, made of stucco in a pale shade of pinkish-gray, with the wooden trim and shutters at its windows painted lavender. Upstairs, at one end of it, French doors led out onto an abbreviated balcony that was overgrown with leafy vines, and from the balcony a frivolous vine-entangled spiral staircase descended to a flagstone terrace at what proved to be the front door. If you stepped back on the grass to take it all in with a single searching glance, the house had a lopsided, crudely fanciful look, like something drawn by a child with an uncertain sense of the way a house ought to be.

—RICHARD YATES, Young Hearts Crying

She was in the inner yard now, moving as if in a trance toward the door, which even from this distance she could see had been sloppily cut and hung so that there was a wide gap running across the doorstep like a black horizontal scar. The windowsills were blistered, the panes gone milky with abrasion. A jagged line of dark nailheads ran the length of the clapboard, climbing crazily to the eaves and back down again as if they’d been blown there on the wind, the boards themselves so indifferently whitewashed they gave up the raised grain of the cheap sea-run pine in clotted skeins and whorls that looked like miniature faces staring out at her—or no, leering at her.

—T. C. BOYLE, San Miguel

MacGregor rebuilt the singer’s house more than a hundred years ago on the decayed princely foundations, with money got, it was rumoured, from bribes. Foursquare, there is a flagged inner courtyard; on the outer aspect, verandahs with rounded arches shading the upper as well as the ground floor rooms. The brickwork is stuccoed and painted cream that always dries yellow. Stone steps lead from the gravel driveway to the front entrance.

—PAUL SCOTT, The Jewel in the Crown

I came to on the loggia—the only question was whose loggia? There was the Cavanaghs’ loggia, designed by that famous and locally celebrated architect whom I once met. The name is gone. The Cavanaghs’ loggia faced the backyard, and they had a splendid garden with unusual varieties of rosebushes.

—RICK MOODY, “The Omega Force,” Right Livelihood: Three Novellas

Then suddenly the car plunged into a tunnel and emerged into another world, a vast, untidy suburban world of filling stations and billboards, of low houses in gardens, of vacant lots and waste paper, of occasional shops and office buildings and churches—primitive Methodist churches built, surprisingly enough in the style of the Cartuja at Granada, Catholic churches like Canterbury Cathedral, synagogues disguised as Hagia Sophia, Christian Science churches with pillars and pediments, like banks.

—ALDOUS HUXLEY, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

Seventy-seventh Street was very wide at the point. On one side was the museum, a marvelous Romanesque Revival creation in an old reddish stone. It was set back in a little park with trees. Even on a cloudy day like this the young spring leaves seemed to glow. Verdant was the word that crossed his mind. On this side of the street, where he was walking, was a cliff of elegant apartment houses overlooking the museum. There were doormen. He got glimpses of marbled halls. And then he thought of the girl with the brown lipstick. . . .

—TOM WOLFE, The Bonfire of the Vanities

In the spring and summer, boxes of brilliant flowers and strange plants crowd almost every apartment window, some with leaves so large they look tropical. Clover, wood-sorrel, crab grass, and violets sprout from the sidewalk cracks that are off to the side, and there’s always a sweet perfume that comes from either wisteria, pine, or honeysuckle. Steam rises from the manholes like water escaping from a pot. Branches from each side of the street reach across, forming awnings overhead whose leaves sound like hundreds of tiny drums whenever it rains. In the winter, holiday decorations pick up where nature leaves off and the color comes from tasteful wreaths hanging on the windows and doors, and garlands of pine and Christmas lights winding down the wrought iron gates, railings, and balustrades.

—STACY HORN, Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others

The grassy track ran level, curved and dipped a little, emerged from the trees. The house, dazzlingly white where the afternoon sun touched it, stood with its shadowed back to me. It had been built on the seaward side of a small cottage that had evidently existed before it. It was square, with a flat roof and a colonnade of slender arches running round the south and east sides. Above the colonnade was a terrace. I could see the open french windows of a first-floor room giving access to it.

—JOHN FOWLES, The Magus

Rudyard was a small town like many others in the Middle West, its core a few dark buildings, still smudged with coal soot, and several tin hangars with corrugated plastic roofs that housed various farm services. At the outskirts, a kind of mini-suburbanization was under way, with strip malls and tract homes, the result of the economic security afforded by an unusual anchor industry—the prison.

When they turned a corner on a movie-set neighborhood of maple trees and small frame houses, the facility suddenly loomed at the end of the block, like a horror-flick monster jumping out of a closet, a half-mile continuum of randomly connected yellow-brick buildings, notable for the narrowness of the few windows. Those structures in turn surrounded an old stone edifice stout enough to have survived the Middle Ages.

—SCOTT TUROW, Reversible Errors

The night sky was clear. The air was faintly scented with the aroma of flowers which grew in such profusion inside the walled gardens that belonged to the rich families in our neighborhood. Often I had climbed those walls and peered through the black iron grillework into the great rooms of their houses or looked down into the gardens where, among the beds of flowers, a stone hut had been piled up to shelter the house slaves.

—PAULA FOX, The Slave Dancer

A square smug brown house, rather damp. A narrow concrete walk up to it. Sickly yellow leaves in a window with dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cottonwoods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch.

—SINCLAIR LEWIS, Main Street

I like my bedroom, too. I’ve had a lot of bedrooms in my life—twenty-seven, if you count every room change at boarding school and college—but never one quite like this. High ceilings, windows looking out over the front stoop, wall-to-wall mirrored closets. Okay, the mirrors are yellowed and the wallpaper is a faded rosebud print that looks like something out of an old movie. It just feels right. Like this is how it’s supposed to look.

—GEMMA BURGESS, Brooklyn Girls

The church was a Gothic monument of shingles painted pigeon blue. It had stout wooden buttresses supporting nothing. It had stained-glass windows with heavy traceries of imitation stone. It opened the way into long streets edged by tight, exhibitionist lawns. Behind the lawns stood wooden piles tortured out of all shape; twisted into gables, turrets, dormers; bulging with porches; crushed under huge, sloping roofs.

—AYN RAND, The Fountainhead

Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory.

—DANNY HAKIM, “Faster than the Speed of Light?” New York Times, July 22, 2013

The building was of gray, lichen-blotched stone, with a high central portion and two curving wings, like the claws of a crab, thrown out on each side. In one of these wings the windows were broken and blocked with wooden boards, while the roof was partly caved in, a picture of ruin. The central portion was in little better repair, but the right-hand block was comparatively modern, and the blinds in the windows, with the blue smoke curling up from the chimneys, showed that this was where the family resided.

—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” The Extraordinary Cases of Sherlock Holmes

Life radiated out from the club to the “cottages” on West and Eden Streets, large shapeless shingle structures, sometimes brightly painted, with well-mowed emerald lawns, to the cozy shops on Main Street with windows invitingly full of imported luxuries, to the woods and the long blue driveways of the more distant villas concealed by spruce and pine, yet all familiar to us, including stone castles, Italian palazzos, Georgian red brick villas, but still for the most part shingle habitations, with dark proliferating turrets and porches.

—LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS, Honorable Men

The Ansonia, the neighborhood’s great landmark, was built by Stanford White. It looks like a baroque palace from Prague or Munich enlarged a hundred times, with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons. Black television antennae are densely planted on its round summits.

—SAUL BELLOW, Seize the Day

Now’s the time to gaze across all those red-grooved roof-waves oceaning around, all the green-tarnished tower-islands rising above white facades which grin with windows and sink below us into not yet completely telephone-wired reefs; now’s the time to enjoy Europe Central’s café umbrellas like anemones, her old grime-darkened roofs like kelp, her hoofbeats clattering up and bellnotes rising, her shadows of people so far below in the narrow streets.

—WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN, Europe Central

Behind the farm the stone mountains stood up against the sky. The farm buildings huddled like little clinging aphids on the mountain skirts, crouched low to the ground as though the wind might blow them into the sea. The little shack, the rattling, rotting barn were grey-bitten with sea salt, beaten by the damp wind until they had taken on the color of the granite hills.

—JOHN STEINBECK, “Flight,” The Long Valley

All started well. The bus was old, with cracked armrests, and it smelled of urine, but was freshly swept, and I had an aisle seat with no one next to me. And the road, it turned out, had been paved in December, two lanes of smooth blacktop snaking up the Andes into a cold, largely treeless world of llamas and adobe houses with smoke pouring from chimneys in thatch roofs.

The clouds were ominous, though. And a couple of hours out, as we started descending the Andes’ eastern flanks, everything changed: the pavement ended. Harsh white lightning ripped through the skies and torrential rains poured down. The bus filled; the air turned humid and thick.

—CARL HOFFMAN, The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Trains, and Planes

It was set on a little rise, a biggish box of a house, two-story, rectangular, gray, and unpainted, with a tin roof, unpainted too and giving off blazes under the sun for it was new and the rust hadn’t bitten down into it yet, and a big chimney at each end.

—ROBERT PENN WARREN, All the King’s Men

This last sign pointed toward a wide pair of doors at the end of the alley. It was all marvelously pompous and silly. And yet . . . as he walked along, Vendacious took a long look at the crenellations above him. Surely that was plaster over wood. But if it was real stone, then this was a fortified castle hidden right in the middle of East Home commercialism.

—VERNOR VINGE, The Children of the Sky (Zones of Thought)

On the opposite side of the house, the living room fronts on a spectacular canyon view, breaking open with glass walls and a deep porch, recessed, however, to keep the taut wall line and provide shelter in any weather. Most striking of all is what has happened to the hipped roof, made unfamiliar by an oversized monitor skylight which creates a silhouette like a farmer’s broad-brimmed hat.

—MARY MIX FOLEY, The American House

He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him, and feeling the still security of the house as he looked into the red-walled dining room, or climbed the stairs to the double drawing room, and up again past the half-open doors of the white bedrooms. The first flight of stairs, fanning out into the hall, was made of stone; the upper flights had the confidential creak of oak.

—ALAN HOLLINGHURST, The Line of Beauty

Composite ranches feature irregular perimeter outlines. Thus they are characterized by degrees of irregular massing with L- and T-shapes the most prevalent forms. . . . Like other ranches, roofs are low-pitched except that multiple-gables, multiple-hip, and combined gable and hip roofs predominate.

—JOHN A. JAKLE, ROBERT W. BASTIAN, AND DOUGLAS K. MEYER, Common Houses in America’s Small Towns

The suffused light I had detected seconds before goes out in a flicker, while a second, brighter alpenglow leaks through three sets of wooden shutters. There is no glass. I stare at a room unlike any I have seen. Thirty feet above the ground floor, mountain views all around. Crafted with fancy handiwork, Tibetan dragons, filigree, and crenellation.

—MICHAEL TOBIAS, Voice of the Planet

By the early fall, Deb had finally reached a fancy corbelled top of the chimney. And Eantha launched into Judith Jones’ series of duck recipes. There were many steps, each one dependent on the before. First the chimney, then the roof, thought Eantha, rendering cracklings for the next night’s cassoulet.

—BAILEY WHITE, “The Second Hand or the Roach,” National Public Radio, November 22, 2012

The ceiling design is in large coffered bays corresponding to the buttresses, which are emphasized by the pietra serena pilasters resting on a string-course above the tops of the desks and supporting a narrow architrave below the ceiling.

—LINDA MURRAY, Michelangelo

Inside the carriage house, there was one cavernous room and a loft under thick cedar beams. Encompassed by slabs of hewn wood, the air was hushed. It held promise. One corner was rounded into a turret shape; the roof was a series of intersecting gambrels, one for the turret, one for the carriage room, one for the owl’s nest that peeked up over the loft. Outside, the shingles were white on the siding, dove gray on the roof, weathered by decades of wind.

—LOUISA HALL, The Carriage House

For just a moment I linger at the carriageway. The shroud, the pall, the unspeakable, clutching emptiness of it all. Then I walk quickly along the gravel path near the wall, past the arches and columns, the iron staircases from one quadrangle to the other. Everything is locked tight. Locked for the winter. I find the arcade leading to the dormitory. A sickish light spills down over the stairs from the grimy, frosted windows.

—HENRY MILLER, Tropic of Cancer

I have thirteen wives. We all live together in a sprawling Queen Anne house with half a dozen gables, two round towers, and a wraparound porch, not far from the center of town. Each of my wives has her own room, as I have mine, but we gather for dinner every evening in the high dining room, at the long table under the old chandelier with its pink glass shades. Later, in the front room, we play rummy or pinochle in small groups, or sit talking in faded armchairs or couches.

—STEVEN MILLHAUSER, “Thirteen Wives,” The New Yorker, May 27, 2013

The flat roofs, azoteas, were protected by stone parapets, so that every house was a fortress. Sometimes these roofs resembled parterres of flowers, so thickly were they covered with them, but more frequently these were cultivated in broad terraced gardens, laid out between the edifices. Occasionally a great square or marketplace intervened, surrounded by its porticos of stone and stucco; or a pyramidal temple reared its colossal bulk, crowned with its tapering sanctuaries, and altars blazing with inextinguishable fires. The great street facing the southern causeway, unlike most others in the place, was wide, and extended some miles in nearly a straight line, as before noticed, through the centre of the city.

—WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, History of the Conquest of Mexico

Number 5 is a low, two-story brick interruption after the wall with an airport orange wooden door and a bronze plaque the size of an Etch A Sketch that reads École Primaire. Primary school. But this can’t be a school anymore, can it? Unless I’ve been sent to the wrong place? Two bow windows sit on either side of the door like eyes on a face, and the door itself is like a mouth that might try and eat you.

—SUSAN CONLEY, Paris Was the Place

He walked up toward the Kingsbrook bridge past the Georgian house that was now the Youth Employment Bureau, past the Queen Anne house that was now a solicitor’s office, and entered a newly opened shop in a block with maisonettes above it. It was bright and clean, with a dazzling stock of pots and jars and bottles of scent.

—RUTH RENDELL, From Doon with Death

The houses that adjoined this row of shops were small terraced cottages with front doors that opened straight into the front rooms, and a bare yard of space between the windows and the pavement. Their own house, though not much bigger, was more modern and semi-detached, with a pebble-dash façade and some decorative woodwork which his father, like their neighbours, kept brightly painted in two colours, green and cream.

—DAVID LODGE, Out of the Shelter

Harry and Ron looked at each other, then leaving Wormtail’s body on the floor behind them, ran up the stair and back into the shadowy passageway leading to the drawing room. Cautiously they crept along it until they reached the drawing room door, which was ajar.

—J. K. ROWLING, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Imagine to yourself, my dear Letty, a spacious garden, part laid out in delightful walks, bounded with high hedges and trees, and paved with gravel; part exhibiting a wonderful assemblage of the most picturesque and striking objects, pavilions, lodges, groves, grottoes, lawns, temples and cascades; porticoes, colonades [sic], and rotundos; adorned with pillars, statues, and painting. . . .

—TOBIAS SMOLLETT, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

He’d grown up in an old house on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, and spent a lot of time in the impressive old homes of Presidio Heights, and the suburbs of San Francisco, including Berkeley, where he’d gone to school, and Hillsborough, where his late grandfather’s half-timbered mansion had been the holiday gathering place for many a year.

—ANNE RICE, The Wolf Gift

It is one of two evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been painted white, and which, with the delicate moldings of the cornice, form the sole and efficient decoration of the street front; nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be better.

—WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, The Rise of Silas Lapham

My grandfather told me these stories about himself while sitting on the roof of the storm cellar, a dank cell to which we often repaired at inconvenient times—both my mother and my grandmother were paranoid about tornadoes. Any dark cloud might send us scuttling downward, into a place that, as I discovered early, was not scorpion free.

Our ranch house, which my father and my grandfather built from plans purchased from Montgomery Ward—usually the supplier was just called Monkey Ward—was a simple shotgun house, three bedrooms and a bath on the south side, simple hall, kitchen, dining room, living room on the north side. We rarely used the living room, although my grandfather was laid out in it, once he died. It did have a fireplace, into which my grandfather, before his death, often spat copiously.

As a very small child I was awed by the amount of spit he could summon—I didn’t realize that most of it was tobacco juice.

—LARRY MCMURTRY, Books: A Memoir

The pretty Queen Anne house, with its pitted rosy-red bricks and its blunted grey stonework, stretched its bland length with a certain luxuriant confidence, surrendering itself to the garden whose proportions were perfectly attuned to its own.

—IRIS MURDOCH, An Unofficial Rose

He went into the scullery at the back of the house. He dipped a tin bowl into the water barrel, washed his face and hands, and poured the water away in the shallow stone sink. The scullery had a copper with a fire grate underneath, but it was used only on bath night, which was Saturday.

—KEN FOLLETT, Fall of Giants

It was long and low built, with a pillared veranda and balcony all the way round. The soft white bulk of it lay stretched upon the green garden like a sleeping beast.

—KATHERINE MANSFIELD, “Prelude,” The Best Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

Then, having previously studied the map and committed the route to memory, he set off across the Pont au Double and entered the medieval maze of the Île de la Cité. After getting lost in the cul-de-sacs and the chapel closes, he found the other bank and threaded his way through the crowded streets to the east of the Louvre.

—GRAHAM ROBB, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

Derricks swung steel girders into place 18 hours after they left the furnaces in Pittsburgh and just hours after they had been numbered for assembly in an empty lot in New Jersey. The building’s skeleton marched upward at a rate of four and a half floors a week. In June, 290 bricklayers and 384 carriers left the ground, chasing the steelworkers into the sky as they ate into a lode of 10 million bricks. Following them, stoneworkers clad the building in a thin layer of Indiana limestone, 200,000 cubic feet in all. Onto this gray skin workers bolted 300 tons of polished chrome-nickel alloy fashioned into shining vertical spandrels. Red metal window frames were laid into 6,400 holes in the tower.

—MITCHELL PACELLE, Empire: A Tale of Obsession, Betrayal, and the Battle for an American Icon

. . . I escaped to the open country and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel, however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance, but after my late dearly bought experience, I dared not enter it.

—MARY SHELLEY, Frankenstein

That night Razor Blade Baby and I left the party and started our walk back to 315 Lake. It had been raining heavily up in the Sierras for two days straight, and the Truckee was raging—the highest I’d ever seen it. The water was milky and opaque, and in it tumbled massive logs that had probably lain on the river’s bed for years. Across the bridge two concrete stumps with rebar worming out the tops stood on either side of the street like sentinels, all that was left of the original arch.

—CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS, “Ghosts, Cowboys,” Battleborn: Stories

And if you look at the marble walls, the cathedral ceiling we recovered, you can piece together this really narrow, sharply defined V pattern, with the apex pointing somewhere in the middle of the floor, most likely where the rug was, meaning the fire developed really fast and hot in that one spot.

—PATRICIA CORNWELL, Point of Origin

I’ve wanted to live on a farm ever since I was a little girl and my upwardly mobile parents moved my brother and me from one apartment, duplex, and bi-level to the next, finally settling down for good in a “ranch”-style house in “Country Estates.” But real farms were where you had gardens. Real farms were where you had space. Best of all, real farms, and not subdivisions, were where you had horses.

—MARDI JO LINK, Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm

It was a great barn of a room. A tall four-post bed, hung with faded tapestries of Love and War, was set off by oak chests-of-drawers and Court cupboards. The floor was uneven, strangely out of keeping with the rose-infested Brussels carpet so vividly new. Most of the windows, latticed and small, were set flush with the floor; but high up in a dormer was a large window with diamonded panes, uncurtained, black and ominous. A couple of tall cheval-glasses added to the mystery of the room with their reduplication of shadowy corners.

—COMPTON MACKENZIE, Carnival

Of all the streets that meet the circle, P is by far my favorite. As it heads west toward Dupont and Georgetown, it only grows prettier and wider, with the houses increasingly grand and luxurious, as if each step forward were a step toward paradise. Men with matching dogs walk along P Street. Half a mile away are sidewalk cafes and restaurants, three used-book stores, wine shops, flower shops, and cheese shops. And the farther up P you move, the better life gets. From Dupont the street proceeds to Georgetown, where the road narrows and the sidewalks become a quaint uneven brick bordered by nineteenth-century colonial mansions bearing Ionic columns. The trees form a canopy over the cobblestone road, still lined with the metal tracks of the trolley cars that stopped running decades ago.

—DINAW MENGESTU, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

Next morning Johnny got up early and went round to the office of the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company that was in a new greenstained shingled bungalow on the freshly laid out street back of the beach. There was no one there yet, so he walked round the town. It was a muggy gray day and the cottages and the frame stores and the unpainted shacks along the railroad track looked pretty desolate.

—JOHN DOS PASSOS, The Morning of the Century

A stretch now without a quay, just a shoulder, no other pedestrians, but cars seemed to stream past without noticing them. Then they were in Arnavutköy, a line of waterside yalis with elaborate fretwork, and streets behind to wind through, a maze for anyone following.

—JOSEPH KANON, Istanbul Passage

This house was the pride of the town. Faced with stone as far back as the dining-room windows, it was a house of arches and turrets and girdling stone porches: it had the first portcochere seen in that town. There was a central “front hall” with a great black walnut stairway, and open to a green glass skylight called the “dome,” three stories above the ground floor. A ballroom occupied most of the third story; and at one end of it was a carved walnut gallery for the musicians. Citizens told strangers that the cost of all this black walnut and wood-carving was sixty thousand dollars.

—BOOTH TARKINGTON, The Magnificent Ambersons

It is Orlando’s most exclusive gated community. Homes sell there for millions of dollars, though the land—your typical lakeside lots—and the houses—McMansions ranging from the merely huge to the stupendously gargantuan—account for neither the prices nor the prestige.

—T. D. ALLMAN, “The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America,” National Geographic, March 2007

The cottages were mostly rambling, shingled affairs, gabled, dormered, and turreted, with screened porches and wooden walls on the inside and big stone fireplaces. Each cottage was different, yet one seemed much like another. The Aldrich cottage, where the McGhees always stayed, was one of Tommy’s two favorites; it was a big log cabin—the only log cabin on the Island—with a Dutch door. The Farnsworth cottage, his other favorite, was a shingled house weathered to a silver sheen with blue trim and a round room in a high turret that Mrs. Farnsworth sometimes used to take him up to. You could see way up the river from that room.

—WILLIAM MCPHERSON, Testing the Current

The north side of Washington Square Park is lined with Greek Revival mansions built in the 1830s. Henry James’s novel Washington Square is set in one of these houses, one that belonged to his grandmother and that was part of a group called the Rhinelander houses, which were torn down in the early 1950s to make way for a high-rise apartment building. Village pressure prevented the erection of the tall building directly on the square. Number 2 Fifth Avenue came in two parts, therefore; one towering and cream-colored, set back from the square, the other five-storied and red brick, a mock-Georgian structure on the spot where the five-story Rhinelander houses had stood.

—GRACE MARMOR SPRUCH, Squirrels at My Window: Life with a Remarkable Gang of Urban Squirrels

When we finally made it home, Robbie climbed out, and I slithered after him on wobbly legs. Mom had already leaped out, slamming the door behind her. We followed her into the house, a small rancher with cedar-shake siding, a sloping floor, and so many leaks we had buckets all over the house when it rained.

—CHEVY STEVENS, Always Watching

He cared nothing for the lives enclosed within a set of walls and was excited only by the character of the house itself. A circular porch lent this one a jovial air, a double row of open-work bricks rendered another spiteful, while a third, an upstairs house, situated deep in a treed garden, exuded a sinister charm. Ravi’s imagination worked to penetrate the enigma of each dwelling: the brilliance and dark within, the disposition of rooms, the dusty places where dead flies collected.

—MICHELLE DE KRETSER, Questions of Travel

Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background. There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.

—JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

I never get tired of gazing from the back seats of buses at the stone eagles . . . and the cast-iron rosettes and the cast-iron medallions and the clusters of cast-iron acanthus leaves bolted to capitals of cast-iron Corinthian columns and the festoons of cast-iron flowers and the swags of cast-iron fruit and the zinc brackets in the shape of oak leaves propping up the zinc cornices of brownstone houses and the scroll-sawed bargeboards framing the dormers of decaying old mansard-roofed mansions and the terra-cotta cherubs and nymphs and satyrs and sibyls and sphinxes and Atlases and Dianas and Medusas serving as keystones in the arches over the doorways and windows of tenement houses.

—JOSEPH MITCHELL, “Street Life,” The New Yorker, February 11 and 18, 2012

Around the time that Junior was born, we moved to a newly constructed public housing project in Soundview, just a ten-minute drive from our old neighborhood. The Bronxdale Houses sprawled over three large city blocks: twenty-eight buildings, each seven stories tall with eight apartments to a floor. My mother saw the projects as a safer, cleaner, brighter alternative to the decaying tenement where we had lived.

—SONIA SOTOMAYOR, My Beloved World

There was always a little grey street leading to the stage-door of the theatre and another little grey street where your lodgings were, and rows of little houses with chimneys like the funnels of dummy steamers and smoke the same colour as the sky; and a grey stone promenade running hard, naked and straight by the side of the grey-brown or grey-green sea. . . .

—JEAN RHYS, Voyage in the Dark

Two doors from Henry’s was the abandoned house. It wore cinderblock bandages over the windows and doorway like a mummy with blanked eyes and stilled howling mouth, and had a blasted yard with no fence or gate. The stoop was barren too, no rail. Possibly someone had taken the ironwork for scrap. The mummy house was a flat surface with no windows, so it made a high wall for wallball, a game where a spaldeen was bounced high against the wall by a thrower and caught by a catcher standing in the field of the street, zipping between the cars to make the catch.

—JONATHAN LETHEM, The Fortress of Solitude

He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

—PHILIP K. DICK, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I’ve been working on the window series for over two years, rummaging around the city with my sketchbook and Nikon. Church windows, reflective windows, Boston’s ubiquitous bays. Large, small, old, broken, wood- and metal-framed. Windows from the outside in and the inside out. I especially like windows on late winter afternoons before anyone inside notices the darkening sky and snaps the blinds shut.

—B. A. SHAPIRO, The Art Forger

We lived on the first floor of a three-story brownstone house that stood on a quiet street just off busy Lee Avenue. The brownstone row houses lined both sides of the street, and long, wide, stone stairways led from the sidewalks to the frosted-glass double doors of the entrances.

—CHAIM POTOK, The Chosen

The house is narrow and quite distinctive, with pilasters and spandrel panels and a keystone above the parlor floor window in the shape of a bearded man. The brownstones looked much as they do today, though their facades were worn, and many hid rooming houses within. The day the Mieles moved in, Mr. Miele first unpacked a shotgun that he left sitting on the stoop for all to see.

—WENDELL JAMIESON, “The Crime of His Childhood,” New York Times, March 2, 2013, Metropolitan

Judge Tyler’s house was one of the brick ones, with a Mansard roof and patterns in the shingles. There were dormer windows. It was three stories high, with a double-decker veranda, and with white painted stonework around all the windows, which were high and narrow. The whole house looked too high and narrow, and there were a lot of steps up to the front door. There was a lawn, and lilac bushes, and out back a long, white carriage house and stable. It was a new place, and the brick looked very pink and the veranda and stonework very white. It looked more than ever high and narrow because there weren’t any big trees around it yet, but only some sapling Lombardies, about twice as high as a man, along the drive.

—WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK, The Ox-Bow Incident

The elevated trains provided a rather unexpected benefit to passengers: They were fun. The height of the cars, at sixty feet above ground along some sections of track, allowed relatively unobstructed, expansive views. Towering over church steeples, the city’s tallest structures, the elevated cars allowed New Yorkers to discover aspects of the city they had never seen before. Predating the roller coaster, the elevated trains coiled through space at relatively high speeds. Adults and children alike would clamor to get a space at the front of the first car.

—TRACY FITZPATRICK, Art and the Subway: New York Underground

The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness; here and there their parti-coloured façade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity; smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown. . . .

—H. G. WELLS, “The Country of the Blind,” The Country of the Blind and Other Stories

The beauty of the campus, an acquired taste, certainly, lay in its stalwart understatement, its unapologetic capitulation to the supremacy of line over color, to the artistry of repetition, and the lyrics of a scrupulous unsentimental vision. The four barracks and all the main academic buildings on campus faced inward toward the parade ground, a vast luxurious greensward trimmed like the fairway of an exclusive golf course.

—PAT CONROY, The Lord of Discipline

I drove on past the curve that goes down into the Strip and stopped across the street from a square building of two stories of rose-red brick with small white leaded bay windows and a Greek porch over the front door and what looked, from across the street, like an antique pewter doorknob. Over the door was a fanlight and the name Sheridan Balou, Inc., in black wooden letters severely stylized.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER, The Little Sister

The temple, made of sandstone, was a massive pyramid-like structure in the shape of a chariot. It was dedicated to the great master of life, the sun, which struck three sides of the edifice as it made its journey each day across the sky. Twenty-four giant wheels were carved on the north and south sides of the plinth. The whole thing was drawn by a team of seven horses, speeding as if though the heavens.

—JHUMPA LAHIRI, Interpreter of Maladies

Most of the cottages were built of Cotswold stone and were roofed by split-stone tiles. The tiles grew a kind of golden moss which sparkled like crystallised honey. Behind the cottages were long steep gardens full of cabbages, fruit-bushes, roses, rabbit-hutches, earth-closets, bicycles, and pigeon-lofts. In the very sump of the valley wallowed the Squire’s Big House—once a fine, though modest sixteenth-century manor, to which a Georgian façade had been added.

—LAURIE LEE, Cider with Rosie