Favourite Architectural Detail

A lot of architecture looks great as a whole. But some have so many great little details that can get lost. What is your favourite?
Here's mine. I would love to have these and hang them in my home even though they wouldn't match anything. I would totally remodel/redecorate just to have them

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I grew up in a 180 year old sandstone house, heavily renovated of course, my dad's main hobby was basically working on that house every other afternoon or weekend.

He had me help him put GENUINE fachwerk on the second story, and I'm not talking the American "fachwerk" were boards are nailed to the side of a house, this was real beams taking structural load and supporting insulation and plaster (although with some chicken wire in the plaster to help hold it together, but it's not visible), and all the lag-bolt and screw holes were plugged with wood plugs he hand-carved and stained to match, so it looked like it was held to gether by old-style pegs, but it was actually screwed-n-glued tough enough to survive perhaps another century or two.

Wish I had pictures of it on this machine...

Also arches. He took out a wall in the downstairs floor (read, a solid sandstone-and-mortared wall about a foot thick) and built a roughly semi-circular sandstone-and-mortar arch in it's place with 10 ft. of avg. diameter, and when the ceiling supports were removed, it took the load like it was an afterthought! And it looked gooood.... plaster meeting up with the exposed sandstone of the arch, separating the kitchen and dining room perfectly, open enough to move through, but distinct enough to separate the rooms.

Man I miss that place... sandstone is also an amazing heat-sink. Hot day? It's like a cool cave in the house. Have to be careful about moisture though, but the windows were old single-pane glass windows that wern't airtight, but wern't bad enough to counter the amazing insulation properties of the sandstone first floor and fachwerk second floor.

Also, since it was out in the boonies, power outages in winter were kinda common. We found and installed two old cast-iron wood stoves, one in the living room, one in the kitchen, using the existing small chimneys in each. They were amazing, the firebox in the stove was only the size of a shoebox, so it didn't support much of a fire, but it didn't need to; that firebox would heat the entire stove into a hot hunk of iron radiating heat throughout the room. In a power outage, it was no problem at all to cook with the stove that was also heating the house in place of the electrically-controlled fuel-oil furnace. Get some frying pans, cook up eggs, bacon, biscuits and beans... celebrate school being canceled, go sled 'n stuff, come back in, warm up next to a hot stove, was awesome.

Kinda rambled there, guess this post made me miss that house, lol.

 

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Gargoyles have been a favorite of mine along with many other things as well.

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I like the vaulted arch. Not only is it simple and aesthetically pleasing, it has practical advantages too: a vaulted ceiling is stronger than a flat ceiling made of the same material.

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What's a vaulted arch?

 

do you have a pic of a favourite?

I tend to like wood architecture more than stone or metal. I do have to admit a fondness for the Chrysler Building though.

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I like the ideas of new wooded housin complexes and floors and stuff I hear there's been a dramatic "change" to the whole concepts of architectual developments occuring with the past few years and so on. I heard some nice things but I don't have many images?