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:
“A great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by England. It is an unfading bay tree.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the room. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)