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:
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)