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An oculus (from Latin oculus 'eye'; pl.: oculi) is a circular opening in the center of a dome or in a wall. Originating in classical architecture, it is a feature of Byzantine and Neoclassical architecture. A horizontal oculus in the center of a dome is also called opaion (from Ancient Greek ὀπαῖον '(smoke) hole'; pl.: opaia).
Nero introduced the dome into Roman palace architecture in the 1st century and such rooms served as state banqueting halls, audience rooms, or throne rooms. The Pantheon's dome, the largest and most famous example, was built of concrete in the 2nd century and may have served as an audience hall for Hadrian.
Many Italian examples of oval domes have semi-circular cross sections, which allowed for easier construction using semi-circular transverse centering. Vignola's oval plan church of Sant'Anna dei Palafrenieri was the first to be built within Rome, and was designed in 1572 with seven windows between the eight ribs in its oval dome.
Byzantine architecture is the architecture of the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire, usually dated from 330 AD, when Constantine the Great established a new Roman capital in Byzantium, which became Constantinople, until the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453.
The curved squinch forms used by the Fatimids were replaced by the Ayyubids with more angular forms. An interior zone of transition with three tiers of squinches was first used by the Ayyubids, resulting in a higher dome. The earliest example was in wood in the dome of Mausoleum of Imam al-Shafi'i (1211).
The dome chamber in the Palace of Ardashir, the Sassanid king, in Firuzabad, Iran, is the earliest surviving example of the use of the squinch. [7] [8] After the rise of Islam, it remained a feature of Islamic architecture, especially in Iran, and was often covered by corbelled stalactite-like structures known as muqarnas.
In architecture, a pendentive is a constructional device permitting the placing of a circular dome over a square room or of an elliptical dome over a rectangular room. [1] The pendentives, which are triangular segments of a sphere, taper to points at the bottom and spread at the top to establish the continuous circular or elliptical base needed for a dome. [2]
The hemispherical dome is a surface formed by the rotation around a vertical axis of a semicircle. Like other "rotational domes" formed by the rotation of a curve around a vertical axis, hemispherical domes have circular bases and horizontal sections and are a type of "circular dome" for that reason.