GLOSSARY OF TERMS  


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  • Amenity: Aesthetic or other features of a development that increase its marketability or usability to the public.

    Arcade: A passageway, one side of which is an open span of arches supporting a roof.

    Architectural Features: These include, but are not limited to, the exterior details of a building or structure, such as the type, style, or color of roofs, windows, doors, and appurtenances. Architectural features will include interior architectural features where the interior is authorized for review. (UDC)

    Architectural Style: Useful tools for analyzing general types of historic resources that tend to be related to the building's era of construction and popular regional trends. See the architectural styles section of A Guide to San Antonio's Historic Resources. (UDC)

    Articulation: The manner in which portions of a building form are expressed (materials, color, texture, pattern, modulation, etc.) and come together to define the structure.

    Block Face: The properties abutting one (1) side of a street and lying between the two (2) nearest intersecting or intercepting streets, or nearest intersecting or intercepting street and/or railroad right-of-way, unsubdivided land, water course or city boundary. (UDC)

    Canopy: A projection over a niche or doorway; often decorative or decorated. (UDC)

    Colonnade: A covered walkway flanked by rows of columns.

    Compatibility: The size and character of a building element relative to other elements around it. For example, the size and proportion of windows in a building façade are usually related to one another, the spaces between them, and the scale of surrounding buildings.

    Context: The characteristics of the buildings, streetscape, and landscape that supports or surrounds a given building, site, or area such as predominance of period architecture or materials, wide sidewalks, or continuous and overhead weather protection, or consistent street trees.

    Cornice: A projecting, ornamental molding along the top of a building, wall, etc., finishing or crowning it. (UDC)

    Design Principles: A guiding concept as part of the overall project design development that reflects desirable characteristics of the urban environment, or responds to specific site and vicinity opportunities or constraints.

    Façade: The exterior wall of a building exposed to public view or that wall viewed by persons not within the building; an exterior wall. (UDC)

    Fenestration: Window treatment in a building or facade; an opening in a surface. (UDC)

    Gateway: A principal or ceremonial point of entrance into a district or neighborhood.

    Grid: Two or more intersecting sets of regularly space parallel lines. It generates a pattern of regularly spaced parts, such as a street grid.

    High-rise: For the purposes of these Guidelines, any building more than 150 feet high.

    Lintel: The piece of timber, stone, or metal that spans above an opening and supports the weight of the wall above it. (UDC)

    Low-rise: For the purposes of these Guidelines, any building less than 50 feet high.

    Marquee: A shelter projecting over an entrance frequently ornamental and of metal with or without glazing.

    Massing: The three-dimensional bulk of a building height, width, and depth. (UDC)

    Mid-rise: For the purposes of these Guidelines, any building between 50 feet and 150 feet.

    Modulation: A stepping back or projecting forward of sections of a structure's façade within specified intervals of building width and depth, as a means of breaking up a structure's apparent bulk.

    Open Space: An area that is intended to provide light and air, and is designed, depending upon the particular situation, for environmental, scenic or recreational purposes. Open space may include but need not be limited to: lawns, decorative plantings, bikeways, walkways, outdoor recreation areas, wooded areas, greenways and water courses. (UDC)

    Paseo: an at-grade, pedestrian physical access and line of sight access between streets, and are public or semi-public in character.

    Pedestrian Orientation: Development that is designed with a primary emphasis on the street, sidewalk and/or connecting walkway access to the site and building, rather than on auto access and parking lots. (UDC)

    Porte-cochere: A roofed structure attached to a building and extending over a driveway, allowing vehicles to pass through. (UDC)

    Proportion: The balanced relationship of parts of a building, landscape, and structures to each other and to the whole.

    Public Realm: The area between buildings, on the ground as well as above ground.

    Reveal: Usually a line, scoring or joint in a wall/siding that exposes its depth and breaks up its mass.

    Rhythm: Reference to the regular or harmonious recurrence of lines, shapes, forms or colors, incorporating the concept of repetition as a device to organize forms and spaces in architecture.

    Scale: The relationship of a building or structure to its surroundings with regard to its size, height, bulk, and/or intensity; the size and proportion of a building as distinguished from its substance or material. (UDC)

    Setback: A line within a lot parallel to and measured from a corresponding lot line, establishing the minimum required yard and governing the placement of structures and uses on the lot; the open space between the property line of the lot and the nearest projection of a structure. (UDC)

    Site Plan: A detailed plan showing the proposed placement of structures, parking areas, open space, landscaping, and other development features, on a parcel of land.

    Stepback: The required or actual placement of a building a specified distance away from a road, property line, or other structure above the first floor level.

    Spandrel: In skeleton-frame buildings, the panel of wall between adjacent structural columns and between windowsills and the window head next below it.

    Streetscape: The general appearance of a block or group of blocks with respect to the structures, setbacks from public rights-of-way, open space and the number and proportion of trees and other vegetation. (UDC)

    Transparency: Capable of transmitting light in a manner which permits a person standing outside of a building to view shapes, tones, and objects inside a building. A tinted window is considered "transparent" if it meets the requirements recited herein.

    Urban Form: The spatial arrangement of a particular environment, as defined by the connectivity of built mass and form; the natural environment, and the movement of persons, goods and information within.