Ceilings: History and Purpose
A ceiling is the overhead surface or surfaces above a area, and the underside of a floor or a roof. Ceilings are widely used to conceal floor and roof construction. They have been favoured spaces for decoration from the earliest times: either in painting the flat surface, in featuring the structural members of roof or floor, or by dedicating it as an area for an allover pattern of relief.
Little more than guesswork is proved of ancient Greek ceilings, but Roman ceilings were designed richly with relief as well as painting, as is seen within the vault soffits of Pompeian baths. During the Gothic period, the widespread theme was to employ structural elements decoratively then came to the creation of the beamed ceiling, in which sizeable cross-girders support smaller floor beams at right angles to them, beams and girders being richly chamfered and molded and commonly painted in attractive colours.
During the Renaissance, ceiling design was developed to its highest point of uniqueness and variety. Three kinds were elaborated. The first was the coffered ceiling, in the complex design of which the Italian Renaissance architects far outdid their Roman prototypes. Circular, square, octagonal, and L-shaped coffers were designed, with their edges delicately carved and the field of every coffer flourished with a rosette. The second form consisted of ceilings entirely or somewhat vaulted, usually with arched intersections, with painted bands emphasizing the architectural design and with pictures covering the rest of the space. The loggia of the Farnesina villa in Rome, decorated by Raphael and Giulio Romano, is a prime illustration of this. In the Baroque period, amazing figures in heavy relief, scrolls, cartouches, and garlands were also utilized to decorate ceilings of this form. The Pitti Palace in Florence and many French ceilings in the Louis XIV style illustrate this. In the third kind, which was notably characteristic of Venice, the ceiling became one sizeable framed painting, as in the Doges’ Palace.
In contemporary architecture ceilings are sometimes divided into two major forms — the suspended (or hung) ceiling and the exposed ceiling. With ceilings hung at some distance under the structural members, some architects have attempted to conceal super amounts of mechanical and electrical equipment, such as electrical conduits, air-conditioning ducts, water pipes, sewage lines, and lighting fixtures. Many suspended ceilings use a lightweight metal grid suspended from the structure by wires or rods to hold up plasterboard sheets or acoustical tiles.
Other architects, bringing out the aesthetic of the exposed structural system, delight in showing the mechanical and electrical equipment. Due to this desire, many structural systems have been created that have a deliberately expressive power in themselves and become admirable ceilings.
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