On remarquera que le pignon de Vezelay est un masque de comble

GABLE
GABLE (French pignon or
pingon, not very used) :
from Latin pinna, used since
the beginning of the 13th century.
Wall located on the small
side of a construction, as
opposed to the eave wall,
generally with a triangle
top (case of a two side
roof).
The gables are made
either of brick or stone
masonry, or of wood
boards, concrete panels
or metal boarding. They
can either be the frontage, or party walls allowing the backing of flues.
In the buildings covered
with a flat roof, the
gables are square or rectangular.
The historical evolution of
the gable reveals major
changes in its destination
and its treatment.
Greek and Roman architects reserved the gable to
the principal frontage of
the temples such as for
example the pediment of
the Parthenon (1).
At the Roman time, the
gables were decorated with
overlapping ornaments,
sometimes carved with
incrustations of coloured
elements.
The gates of an gothic
cathedral transept are integrated into gable walls (2).
"On remarquera que le pignon de Vezelay est un masque
de comble, mais ne se combine guère avec sa forme. Dans
nos édifices gothiques du XIIIe siècle, ceux de l'île de
France, ceux auxquels il faut toujours recourir comme
étant l'expression classique de cet art, les pignons sont bien
faits pour fermer le comble, ils s'éclairent franchement et le
recouvrent."
Viollet-Le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'Architecture
Française.
In civil architecture up to
the Renaissance, the row
houses very often have
their gable along the street,
hence the French expression "avoir pignon sur rue
(to have gable onto the
street)". Made of timber
frames in northern, eastern
and central France, they
have then very marked
corbellings at their corner
(4).
In Flemish countries and
Hanseatic cities, the gables
have various shapes in particular the crowstepped
gable
(5) and bright
colours like in the town of
Gdansk, in Poland (6).
The baroque time will
cover them with trompel'œil frescos and will give
them a circumvented silhouette.
The Hausmann architecture reduces the gable to a
function of party walls
integrating or supporting
the flues while others are
dedicated to a monumental
decoration like the SaintMichel fountain in Paris
(3).
After the excesses of
advertising murals at the
end of the 19th century
(7), the modern movement
refined the gable by giving
it a double function, either
as a screen or an open
frontage; we are given the
most famous examples by
Corbusier in its Radiant
City of Marseilles or the
dwelling unit (unité
d'habitation) in Firminy
(8), where the NorthSouth orientation plays an
essential part, the South
being reserved for a frontage open to the dwellings,
the North having a blind
gable in the shade.
Then thanks to the 1% of
public construction cost
devoted to the visual arts,
the gables have been covered with figures as for
example the ornamental
ceramics panels and the
murals in Chanteloup-lesVignes (9) ; Sometimes,
only one well placed ornament is enough to give
character to a wall.
More modestly but in an
expressive way, some villages use the gable as a
defence against the climatic
Planche extraite du " Vocabulaire illustré de l'Art urbain ".R.-M. A./C. L. Avril 2001/A.V. Juillet 2001
rigours, with a great plastic
value (10). Such are the
sets of Breton houses with
granite gables incorporating the flue; nearer to us,
one finds them in the mining cities or the south of
France, made of bricks and
treated with much elegance
(A, B, C, D).
The creation of angular
buildings removes the
gable in modern architecture, and affirms the autonomy of the building and the
bursting of the urban composition; however, the
case of tower CBX in la
Défense (11) , , brings us
back to the treatment of
the angle of two streets and
takes as a starting point the
New York "Flat Iron", to
make a plastic effect in an
urban window.
*
Thus, the gable walls have
as much importance as the
other frontages in the
architectural design. They
can be "art in the street"
and be the subject of a
plastic treatment in the
urban composition. .
Cf.
ALIGNMENT,
MURAL,
GAUGE,
VISUAL SEQUENCES,
PROSPECT,
FOUNTAIN, BUILT FRONT,
ANGLE
OF
TWO
STREETS.