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| a sky lit central court in a contemporary building or house; a courtyard, flanked or surrounded by porticoes, in front of an early Christian church |
| the portion of the front or side of a building enclosed by or masking the end of a pitched roof |
squinch
in architecture, any of several devices by which a square or polygonal room has its upper corners filled in to form a support for a dome: by corbelling out the courses of masonry, each course projecting slightly beyond the one below; by building one or more arches diagonally across the corner; by building in the corner a niche with a half dome at its head; or by filling the corner with a little conical vault that has an arch on its outer diagonal face and its apex in the corner
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