Information about buttress

A buttress (and mostly concealed, a flying buttress) supporting walls at the Palace of Westminster

Three different types of buttress: diagonal, on the statue's plinth; an ordinary buttress supporting a flying buttress, to the right of the statue; a small ordinary buttress to the right side of the picture

buttresses at Sint-Petrus-en-Pauluskerk; Ostend, Belgium

Buttress at The Saviour Chapel, Żejtun, Malta

A buttress is an architectural structure built against (a counterfort) or projecting from a wall which serves to support or reinforce the wall. Buttresses are fairly common on more ancient buildings, especially in Germany, as a means of providing support to act against the lateral (sideways) forces arising out of the roof structures that lack adequate bracing.

The word buttress, in a more general sense, means to support; one might buttress another person's arguments, for instance. By visual analogy, that which looks like a buttress may be called so; a projecting tree root at the base of the trunk, for example, may be referred to as a buttress.

In architectural terms, there are at least five distinct types of buttress:

Clasping buttresses support two walls as they meet at a corner by making some length of both walls at the corner thicker than the remainder of the wall.
Angle buttresses, like clasping buttresses, support walls at the corner but in essence by building each wall out beyond the corner, so that in plan the corner in fact is a cross shape.
Flying buttresses may be thought of as half- or semi-arches; the elevated end of the arch supports the wall and the lower end of the arch is mounted on foundations, or on pillars or other flying buttresses. Flying buttresses are especially common in medieval cathedral design.
Set-back buttresses support walls near a corner but set back from it.
Diagonal buttresses support walls at corners but are built diagonally out of the corner of the wall, so forming a 135° angle between the buttress and each wall.

In the two pictures of the Palace of Westminster to the right, the top image shows a buttress serving two functions; it buttresses the lower wall as an ordinary buttress; supports a flying buttress (only the top diagonal of which can be seen) which in turn supports the inset, higher of the two walls. The lower image shows no less than four different buttress designs: the two featured in the top image; diagonal buttresses around the base of the statue's plinth; a plain buttress to the far right of the picture.

Flying buttresses deserve additional mention for the part they played in enabling Gothic cathedrals to be developed into massive and splendidly airy structures. The three elements key to the move from the older, smaller and thicker walled Romanesque architecture were pointed arches, ribbed vaulted roofs and flying buttresses. These worked together to enable the construction of roofs having widths and weights greater than could be contemplated using hammer-beam roof constructions. Ribbed vaulted roofs are a form of arch extended across the floor-space to be roofed, subdivided by ribs (for instance from the four supporting pillars of a roof section) and coming together at a point, rather than continuing in a smooth semicircle as would a plain arch. Such roofs exert force down, but also out, laterally, away from their centre. These forces act on the top of the walls supporting the roof, pushing them apart; the flying buttress' design provides for an equal and opposite force to be imposed on the wall, thus keeping the wall in balance. This, firstly, enables the vaulted roof and, secondly, by externalising some of the structural elements of the wall, allows the wall so supported to be thinner, which in turn enables the development of large arched window sections to let in light and be filled by stained glass.

The pier section of a flying buttresses - that part which rises vertically from the ground (or other support) - is often taller than the flying end of the buttress. The additional height provides a deadweight pressing down on the pier, the function of which is to keep the line of force being opposed by the buttress within the line of the pier. The lateral force exerted by the roof travels down through the arched section of the buttress, and into the pier. Without the additional weight of the over-height pier, the line of force would exit the pier at some point way above the ground; if it did so, the pier would be unable to resist the force and so would collapse at that point. Combining the two force vectors, both from the roof and from the deadweight, keeps the line of force within the masonry of the pier.

In more modern buildings, better internal bracing of structures arising out of a more well-developed understanding of structural engineering diminishes the use of buttresses; however they are by no means obsolete, and will continue to be found as integral parts of certain structures, not least in certain designs of free standing curtain walls and retaining walls.

Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. A wider definition often includes the design of the total built environment: from the macrolevel of town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture to the microlevel of construction details and,
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A 'wall' is a usually solid structure that defines and sometimes protects an area. Most commonly, a wall delineates a building and supports its superstructure, separates space in buildings into rooms, or protects or delineates a space in the open air.
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Anthem
"Das Lied der Deutschen" (third stanza)
also called "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit"
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In physics, force is an action or agency that causes a body of mass m to accelerate. It may be experienced as a lift, a push, or a pull. The acceleration of the body is proportional to the vector sum of all forces acting on it (known as net force or resultant force).
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roof is the uppermost, covering, part of a building. The purpose of the roof is to protect both the building itself and its living or material contents from the effects of weather.
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arch is a curved structure capable of spanning a space while supporting significant weight (e.g. a doorway in a stone wall). The arch appeared in Mesopotamia, Indus Valley civilization, Egypt, Assyria, Etruria, and later refined in Ancient Rome.
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A foundation is a structure that transfers loads to the ground. Foundations are generally broken into two categories: shallow foundations and deep foundations.

Shallow foundations

Main article: Shallow foundation

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A column in architecture and structural engineering is a vertical structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below.
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Middle Ages form the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three "ages": the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern Times.
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cathedral is a church, usually Roman Catholic, Anglican, or Eastern Orthodox, housing the seat of a bishop. The word cathedral takes its name from the word cathedra, or Bishop's Throne (In Latin: ecclesia cathedralis).
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State Party United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Type Cultural
Criteria i, ii, iv
Reference 426
Region Europe and North America

Inscription History
Inscription
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flying buttress, or arc-boutant, is usually on a religious building, used to transmit the thrust of a vault across an intervening space (which might be an aisle, chapel or cloister), to a buttress outside the building.
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Gothic architecture is a style of architecture which flourished in Europe during the high and late medieval period. It was preceded by Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture.
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cathedral is a Christian church that contains the seat of a bishop. It is a religious building for worship, specifically of a denomination with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and some Lutheran churches, which serves as a bishop's seat, and
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Romanesque architecture is the term that is used to describe the architecture of Europe which emerged in the late 10th century and evolved into the Gothic style during the 12th century. The Romanesque style in England is more traditionally referred to as Norman architecture.
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A rib vault or ribbed vault is any vault reinforced by masonry ribs. A rib vault may be a quadripartite rib vault (which is divided into four sections by two diagonal ribs) and a sexpartite rib vault (a rib vault whose surface is divided into six sections by three ribs).
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Hammerbeam roof, in architecture, the name given to a Gothic open timber roof, of which the finest example is that over Westminster Hall (1395–1399).

In order to give greater height in the centre, the ordinary tie beam is cut through, and the portions remaining, known
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stained glass refers either to the material of coloured glass or to the art and craft of working with it. Throughout its thousand-year history the term "stained glass" was applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches, cathedrals and other significant buildings.
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