A bay window is a window space projecting outward from the main walls of a building and forming a bay in a room, either square or polygonal in plan. While most bay windows protrude from a building, some bay windows are level with the exterior and are built into the interior of a room. The angles most commonly used on the inside corners of the bay are 90, 135 and 150 degrees. Bay windows are often associated with Victorian architecture and were a part of the Gothic Revival style. They first achieved widespread popularity in the 1870s.
The windows are commonly used to provide the illusion of a larger room. They are used to increase the flow of natural light into a building and to provide views of the outside that would be unavailable with an ordinary window.
Bay windows were identified as a defining characteristic of San Francisco architecture in a 2012 study that had a machine learning algorithm examine a random sample of 25,000 photos of cities from Google Street View.
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Famous quotes containing the words bay and/or window:
“Baltimore lay very near the immense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay, and out of the bay it ate divinely. I well recall the time when prime hard crabs of the channel species, blue in color, at least eight inches in length along the shell, and with snow-white meat almost as firm as soap, were hawked in Hollins Street of Summer mornings at ten cents a dozen.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The jeweled stripes on the window ran straight down when the train stopped and got more and more oblique as it speeded up. The wheels rumbled in her head, saying Man-hattan Tran-sfer Man-hattan Tran-sfer.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)