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Facade   /fəsˈɑd/   Listen
Facade

noun
1.
The face or front of a building.  Synonyms: frontage, frontal.
2.
A showy misrepresentation intended to conceal something unpleasant.  Synonym: window dressing.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Facade" Quotes from Famous Books



... an elevation of the stage, drawn on the same sheet to twice the scale of the general plan, the stage was four feet six inches above the floor of the pit. This elevation exhibits the surprising feature of a classic facade, Palladian in treatment, on the stage of what so far we have regarded as a late modification of a playhouse of Shakespeare's day. Evidently Inigo Jones contemplated the erection of a permanent architectural proscenium, as the ancients called it, of the type, though far more modest, both ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... had sung turned the boat's prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart. For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation. The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details if she had seen them. Only a sort of ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens

... features and suggestions of the canon, which must play a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; there is the semblance of balustrades on the summit of a noble facade. In one of the immense halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines of three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, and behind and above them the suggestion of three more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed, there is such an opulence of architectural forms in this divine ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... occupied by statues of the great creators and interpreters of the drama in every age and country. The finest Concord granite, from the best quarries in New Hampshire, is the material used in the entire facade, as well as in the Sixth Avenue side.... The glittering granite mass, exquisitely poised, adorned with rich and appropriate carving, statuary, columns, pilasters, and arches, and capped by the springing French roof, fringed with its shapely balustrades, offers an imposing and majestic aspect, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a vast green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto seen. It was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and the facade had an Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as well as the pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type of Chinese porcelain. This difference in aspect suggested a difference in use, and I ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... swinging bricks and marble into the upper layers of the air. Violets were on sale at every corner, and the atmosphere was impregnated with an intoxicating perfume of methylated spirits. Presently he arrived at an immense arched facade bearing principally the legend 'Tea,' and he saw within hundreds of persons sipping tea; and next to that was another arched facade bearing principally the word 'Tea,' and he saw within more hundreds sipping tea; and then another; and then another; and then ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett

... four turned aside from the main road into an avenue of spreading cottonwood trees. At its head the avenue became a circular driveway; and fronting the driveway a stately house, with a massive Georgian facade and colonnaded portico, flung its shadow across the white gravel of ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... upon the bridge she looked across to Stamboul, and was faced by the Mosque of the Valideh. So familiar to her was the sight of its facade, of its cupolas and minarets, that she seldom now even thought of it when she crossed the bridge; but to-day, perhaps because she was unusually strung up, was restive and almost horribly alert, she gazed at it and was intensely conscious of it. She had once said to Dion that Stamboul ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... the Ring, the Archduke paused And gave the soldiers speech, enkindling them As sunrise a confronting throng of panes That glaze a many-windowed east facade: Hot volunteers vamp in from vill and plain— More than we need ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... it would be removed to Edinburgh, or Paris, if the more striking portions of those cities were thus exhibited. The front of the scene was broken by columns, by bays and promontories in the line of the building, which gave beauty and variety to the facade, and aided the deception produced by the paintings that were seen through the three openings. In the Roman Theatres there were commonly two considerable projections, like large bow-windows, or bastions, in ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various

... Byzantine Renaissance." It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich facade with its medallions in coloured marble. The dream was never realised. The vendor, Marchese Montecucculi, hoping to secure a higher price, drew back. Browning was about to force him by legal proceedings to fulfil his bargain, when it was discovered that the walls were cracked and the foundations ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... marvellous than ever. Not a drop of rain fell in the river; the immense facade opposite them was as dry as a skull; yet here was this muddy cataract. It fell for half an hour, scarcely so much as spattering them in their recess, but plunging over them into the torrent beneath. By the time it ceased they had eaten ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... the only pleasure- ground in Venice where there are any trees, and at nightfall I came back in the gondola down the canal, then more sombre and silent, till I reached the spot where I could see my solitary lamp shining from the night-shrouded facade of the old Palazzo Giustiniani. After I had worked a little longer Karl, heralded by the swish of the gondola, would come in regularly at eight o'clock for a few hours' chat over our tea. Very rarely did I vary this routine by a visit to one of the theatres. When I did, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... my host. I had seated myself with my back to the facade of my hotel, under the window of my ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... obelisk of Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing in the Place de la Concorde, and in the Tuileries gardens beyond the breeze dreamily stirred the foliage which hid from Lynde's view the gray facade of the gutted palace, still standing there, calcined and cracked by the fires of the Commune. Presently all this began to distract him, and when he returned to the hotel he was in a humor that would have been comparatively tranquil if so many tedious miles ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... presents a facade of rough stone covered with plaster, cracked by weather and lined by the mason's instrument into a semblance of blocks of cut stone. This frontage is so common in Paris and so ugly that the city ought to offer premiums to house-owners who would build their facades of cut-stone ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... seemed to disappear. New shop-frontages went; a wall, brought up flush where formerly a recess had been, became the recess once more; the intermittent electric sign at the street's end, that wrote in green and crimson the name of a whiskey across a lamp-lit facade, ceased to worry his eyes; and the unfamiliar new front of the little restaurant he was passing and repassing took on its old and well-known ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... halted before an ancient square building, the outside of which has been much encroached upon by the alluvial earth of ages, and the simple but correct Tuscan portico, encumbered with piles of fagots for the village use during the approaching winter. The three doorways of the facade were embellished by sculptured wreaths of vine leaves and grapes. Hearing that some Hebrew inscription was to be found beneath one of the windows, we had some of the fagots removed, sufficient to enable us to read the words [Hebrew text] (this house, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... lips that thrilled the hearts of the spectators with alarm: for they knew that the utterance was one of terror. They needed no explanation of that cry; for at the same moment that it reached their ears, they perceived the danger that had caused Ossaroo to utter it. He was descending along the facade of the cliff—not gliding down the rope of his own free will, but as if the kite had got loose at the top, and, yielding to the weight of his body, was being dragged over the surface ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid

... began to rise up high against the moon which was beginning to look out over the huge block of the Colonial Hotel, the sea-wall of which ran along as far as our mooring. A few lights in its windows here and there broke the blank darkness of its facade, glimmering through the avenues of royal palms. I am thus explicit because of something that presently happened, and which stayed the mainsail ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... of rhododendron all ablaze with flower, exquisite vistas and glades, with a view of far-off hills. It seemed to me to be an enchanted pleasaunce, like the great Palace in The Princess. Now and then we could see the huge facade of the house above us, winking through its sunblinds. There was not a soul to be seen; and this added enormously to the magical charm of the place, as though it were the work of a Genie, not made ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the High Street, bowing to others of the committee on their way to the town-hall, a structure of parti-coloured brick in harlequin patterns, with a peaked roof, all over little sham domes, which went far to justify its title of the Rat-house, since nothing larger could well use them. The facade was thus somewhat imposing; of the rear the less said the better; and as to the interior, it was at present one expanse of dust, impeded by scaffold-poles, and all the windows had large blotches of ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... glancing up at the facade of The Hastings, "I'll tell you how you can make a barrel of money out of ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... it must be obvious to you," Dravivian said. "Earth hasn't fought a war for nearly eight hundred years. We wouldn't know how. The organization of guardships around Omega is pure facade. The ships are completely automatized, built to meet conditions of several hundreds years ago. A determined attack will capture a ship; and when you have one, the rest will fall. After that, there's nothing to stop the Omegans from coming ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley

... Building raises its knife-like facade in the centre of Chicago, thirteen stories in all; to the lake it presents a broad wall of steel and glass. It is a hive of doctors. Layer after layer, their offices rise, circling the gulf of the elevator-well. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... World War II, there were rumblings that the powerful IPR might be a communist front, despite its respectable facade—despite the fact that a great majority of its members were Americans whose patriotism ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot

... severe regular front, with its columns and cornices, was built of a white smoothly-faced freestone, which appeared in the rays of the moon as pure as Pentelic marble. The sole objects in the scene rivalling the fairness of the facade were a dozen ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... of Vesta, and of Castor, the Forum Romanum, the Basilica Julia, the Arch of Severus, and the Temple of Saturn, and stands before the majestic ascent to the Capitoline Jupiter, with its magnificent portico and ornamented pediment, surpassing the facade of any modern church. On his left, as he emerges from beneath the sculptured Arch of Titus, is the Palatine Mount, nearly covered by the palace of the Caesars, the magnificent residences of the higher nobility, and various temples, of which that of Apollo ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... them was far pleasanter, as Audrey well knew. From the drawing-room one looked down on the rugged court of the school-house, and on the gray old arches, through which one passed to the chapel and library. The quaint old buildings, with the stone facade, hoary with age, was the one feature of interest that always made Audrey think the Gray Cottage one of the pleasantest houses in Rutherford. Audrey knew every room. She had looked out on the old school-house often and often; she knew ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... dreams. It still stood in the chamber, making the principal object in it, indeed; and when Middleton was left alone, he contemplated it not without a certain awe, which at the same time he felt to be ridiculous. He advanced towards it, and stood contemplating the mimic facade, wondering at the singular fact of this piece of furniture having been preserved in traditionary history, when so much had been forgotten,—when even the features and architectural characteristics ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... for us and a very short drive through a stately avenue brought us to the drawbridge and the iron gates of the "Cour d'honneur." The house looked imposing; I had an impression of a very high and very long facade with two towers stretching out into the court-yard, which is very large, with fine old trees and broad parterres of bright-coloured flowers on either side of the steps. There was a wide moat of running water, the banks covered with shrubs and flowers—the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington

... earth. Smiling at the thought, he walked across the gardens, wandered through some streets of old houses in grey and white stucco with slate mansard roofs and fantastic complications of chimney-pots till he came out in front of a church with a new classic facade of huge columns that seemed toppling by their ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... a concrete facade for a plate girder bridge at St. Louis. Mo., the railing above the base was constructed of separately molded blocks as follows: The balusters were cast in plaster molds. To make these molds a box square in plan and the height of the baluster was constructed of wood ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... by the four Bars, or fortified gateways. These, with their Barbicans, three of which were so needlessly and callously destroyed in the last century, were magnificent examples of noble permanent military architecture. The outer facade of Monk Bar to-day, spoiled as it is, expresses a noble strength. There was formerly only the single way, both for ingress and egress.[6] The Bar was supported on each side by the mound and wall, which latter led right into the Bar ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson

... side of the way, and, as I drew slowly alongside, wondering if I dared knock upon its gates for assistance, I found that house and road curled to the left together. Round the bend I had crept, close to the white facade. As I turned, I saw a light above me, shining out over a low balcony of stone. I had stopped the car and the engine, and stepped on tiptoe to the other side of the road. From there I could see the ceiling of a tall, first-floor room, whose wide, open windows led on to ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... over the sill, peering along the gleaming white facade; no window showed a light that she could see. She listened acutely; not a sound but the muttering of fretful little waves and the drowsy complaint of some bird troubled in ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... however, she could not keep, so that in 1290 we find Corrado Doria sailing into the Porto Pisano, breaking the chain which guarded it, and carrying it back to Genoa, where part of it hung as a trophy till our own time on the facade of the Palazzo ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... a herbaceous border. The border was now rank and wild, and, lying flat under the shade of an azalea, and peering through the young spears of iris, Dickson and Heritage regarded the north-western facade of the house. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... between the lines of cold, colorless houses, from which all light and life had vanished, it seemed to him that their occupants were dead as his love, or had fled their ruined houses as he had. Why should he remain? Yet what was his duty now as a man—as a Christian? His eye fell on the hideous facade of the church he was passing—her church! He gave a bitter laugh and ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte

... The facade of the manor-house glowed as in a bengal light; the sleigh-bells were still tinkling in the yard, where the coachmen were quarrelling over accommodation for their horses. Crowds of village people were leaning against the railings to watch the dancers flit past the windows, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... gate in the palace front, which shuts in the esplanade on the south side. The broad steps of the gate, crowded with Cleopatra's ladies, all in their gayest attire, are like a flower garden. The facade is lined by her guard, officered by the same gallants to whom Bel Affris announced the coming of Caesar six months before in the old palace on the Syrian border. The north side is lined by Roman soldiers, with the townsfolk on tiptoe ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... the Venetian days. Still unfinished, the Turkish conquest having interrupted its progress, with all other in the seventeenth century. In the centre of the quadrangle, round which are the rooms of the monks and the guest-rooms, stands the church, an edifice nondescript as to style, with a facade of a species of Venetian Doric, fronting a building whose plan is a Latin cross, and whose roof observes Byzantine tradition. On the entablature over the doorway are the dedicatory Greek capitals, [Greek: BGYTHTP],—the meaning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... Togoland became Togo in 1960. General Gnassingbe EYADEMA, installed as military ruler in 1967, is Africa's longest-serving head of state. Despite the facade of multiparty elections instituted in the early 1990s, the government continues to be dominated by President EYADEMA, whose Rally of the Togolese People (RPT) party has maintained power almost continually since 1967. In addition, Togo has ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... end of the long walk by the northern facade of the Palace came the noise of omnibuses and the cries of the street. Hastings looked at the Palace clock. Six, and as his own watch agreed with it, he fell to poking holes in the gravel again. A constant stream of people passed between the Odeon and the ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers

... purpose of that image-dealer whom I saw on a summer's day lying at the foot of one of our meeting-houses, and doing his best to make it a cathedral, and really giving a sentiment of medieval art to the noble sculptures of the facade which the carpenters had just nailed up, freshly painted and newly repaired. This poet was stretched upon his back, eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of an earthen pot, plucking the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... Pantheon on a Thursday night you will find that the taverne is half deserted by 10 o'clock, and that every one is leaving and walking up the "Boul' Miche" toward the "Bullier." Follow them, and as you reach the place l'Observatoire, and turn a sharp corner to the left, you will see the facade of this famous ball, illumined by a sizzling blue electric light ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith

... of Arundel through the vast Rewell Wood, we come suddenly upon Punch-bowl Green, and open a great green valley, dominated by the white facade of Dale Park House, below Madehurst, one of the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... lines stretched the tall office buildings, lights burning in a few of their windows, even yet. Over the end of the street the lead-coloured sky was broken by a pale faint haze of light, and silhouetted against this rose a sombre mass, unbroken by any glimmer, rearing a black and formidable facade against the blur of ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... down the facade. It was indeed enormous. The house was of five stories, with fifteen windows on each floor. The blinds were black and with many of the slats broken, which gave an indescribable air of ruin and desolation to the place. Four shops occupied the rez-de-chaussee. On ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... their own of Old World charm, and Baedeker recorded the fact that they were full of interest, but this had to be taken on trust. Brunswick made its own special appeal, though we saw little but old houses and the handsome facade of St. Catherine's. Onward we raced till away in the distance we saw Hannover, like a many-masted ship with its high chimneys and myriad lights. We kept up the pace, and at 9.15 pulled up in front of the Hotel Royal. I went in to know if the wire I had sent from Potsdam engaging rooms and ...
— An Account of Our Arresting Experiences • Conway Evans

... to the Cathedral; admired its facade, decorated with mosaics in softly brilliant colors until it looked like a great opal, shining against the deep blue sky; entered it and saw Fra Angelico's grand Christ, and calm, holy saints and angels; and, close to ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... thick hedge. Muller walked along this hedge until he came to a little gate. Then crossing the street, he saw that the house whose windows glistened in the sunlight was a house which he knew well from its other side, its front facade. ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner

... Built quadrangularwise, the court held a fountain which was serviceable to those that wished to bathe. The roof was a garden. The interior facade was of teak wood, carved and colored; the frontal was of stone. Seen from the exterior it looked the fortress of some umbrageous prince, but in the courtyard reigned the seduction of a woman in love. From without it menaced, ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... at the back of the spiral slope, the insect's work ends in a facade of coarse mosaic, formed of small, angular bits of gravel, firmly cemented with a gum the nature of which has to be ascertained. It is an amber-coloured material, semi-transparent, brittle, soluble in spirits of wine ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... Scene is decorated to represent the facade of the Palace of Agamemnon, at Argos; the platform over the Central door appearing as a Watch-tower. At intervals along the front of the Palace, and especially by the three doors, are statues of Gods, amongst them Apollo, Zeus, and Hermes. The time is supposed to be ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton

... to some fierce exclamation, when a feeble wail came pitifully forth from the sheltering folds of her shawl. She restrained herself instantly, and walked on at a rapid pace, scarcely heeding whither she went, till she reached the Catholic church known as the "Oratory." Its unfinished facade loomed darkly out of the fog; there was nothing picturesque or inviting about it, yet there were people passing softly in and out, and through the swinging to and fro of the red baize-covered doors there came a comforting warm glimmer of light. The ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various

... paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown. But it gave them strength to drift into another Piazza, large and dusty, on the farther side of which rose a black-and-white facade of surpassing ugliness. Miss Lavish spoke to it dramatically. It was Santa ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... pointed out. It was of composite architecture, comprising features of the Egyptian, Byzantine and Greek. The stately obelisks which guarded its entrance ways and the bas-relief panels which formed its outer facade, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... proportions of the facade with awe. Had she not been with her father, she would never have found the courage to lift that shining knocker in the center of the broad paneled door. She would have gone on past this place, she was sure; it seemed so much too large ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox

... the left was an ornamental water sailed in by many swans. On the right extended a flower garden, laid in the old manner, and at this season of the year, as brilliant as stained glass. The front of the house presented a facade of more than sixty windows, surmounted by a formal pediment and raised upon a terrace. A wide avenue, part in gravel, part in turf, and bordered by triple alleys, ran to the great double gateways. It was impossible to look without surprise on a place that had been prepared ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... be sure: THE BENEDICK. What a nice-looking building! I don't think I've ever seen it before." She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian facade. "Which are your windows? Those with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... standing on the little public square of which it occupies one whole side. It is an attractive, but not imposing structure with two large courts. The Della Rovere, successors of the Sforza in Pesaro, beautified it during the sixteenth century; they built the noble facade which rests upon a series of six round arches. The Sforza arms have disappeared from the palace, but in many places over the portals and on the ceilings the inscription of Guidobaldus II, duke, and the Della Rovere arms may be seen. Even in Lucretia's day the magnificent banquet hall—the most beautiful ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... of widely sundered generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic facade and towers of finest small brickwork with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not sacreligiously pull down the ancient half-timbered ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... The facade was brightly illuminated by the flames from the burning factory, smoke issued from between the tiles of the roof and rolled out of the open windows of the first story. Within the fire rumbled and crackled. There was a slow groaning sound, that turned into a rolling and ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.' So long, however, as the general proportions were the same, there was no fear that the new edifice would topple over if it did not conform exactly in height and length and breadth, in column and pilaster and facade, to the venerated model in the mother countries. The brethren expressed their views to the churches in the home land. They did more. They plead their cause and hoped for endorsement. The following is part of a lengthy but very interesting communication written by Mr. Talmage and sent to the Synod ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg

... the colony should be its club-house, which is the finest looking building in the place of its style. It is very extensive, and built of blocks of granite, with a splendid front, a facade supported by a number of large granite pillars; and its interior arrangements correspond with ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... Historic mansions by the dozen were offered him. Their owners, exhausted by the expense of maintaining them, were more than anxious to sell. So he bought the castle of Villeblanche-sur-Marne, built in the time of the religious wars—a mixture of palace and fortress with an Italian Renaissance facade, gloomy towers with pointed hoods, and moats in which ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... plot of arid earth scantily tufted with grass, suggesting that stage of baldness which finally precedes complete nudity. Behind this, the moat-like area was spanned to the front door by a ragged stoop of brownstone. The four-story facade was of brick whose pristine coat of fair white paint had aged to a dry and flaking crust, lending the house an ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... church. There were bas-reliefs of cherubim and seraphim over the doorway, fat, distorted bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... Michael. Read it attentively, my boy—trust to me. I'll make the house's name ring throughout the country. Don't forget what I have said. We must have a new facade to the old building after a while. I have such a plan ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder—or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... University, a majestic building occupying a block on a wide boulevard, and before the Academy of Science, another large white marble edifice adjoining the University, a building much more elaborate than its neighbor, with Ionic porticoes, a facade enlivened by bright coloring and gilding, and pediments adorned ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... a certain something about the events of that war that makes them stand out in bold relief, like architectural images on the facade of an edifice. They throw all other recollections of a lifetime into the shade. As I sit at my desk writing, with memory at elbow as a prompter, it is difficult to believe that today (May 7, 1908) it lacks ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd

... South facade of Palace of Varied Industries, by Faville. High walls, seventy feet in height, suggest ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... standard of a comprehensible experience. But the effort is not always crowned with complete success." (Freud, "Traumdeutung," p. 330.) The secondary elaboration can be compared also to the erection of a facade. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... coloured buildings which compose the city. The rest of the ground is occupied with a collection of churches of all shapes and sizes and colours, and towers, and convents, and palaces. One palace, however, surpasses them all in beauty and size, though its shining white walls and richly-carved facade and general bran-new appearance look sadly out of place among all the venerable, grotesque, many-coloured, odd-shaped, Byzantine edifices which are dotted about in its neighbourhood. It looks like some huge intruder into the place, ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... not merely in the archaeology of the AEgean, but also in the modern customs and ancient pictures of the most distant peoples. For example, in New Guinea the place of the sacrificial pig may be taken by the cowry-shell;[435] and upon the chief facade of the east wing of the ancient American monument, known as the Casa de las Monjas at Chichen Itza, the hieroglyph of the planet Venus is placed in conjunction with a picture ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... beautiful church, S. Miniato in Sul Monte, in the time of Messer Alibrando, citizen and Bishop of Florence; for the reason that, besides the marble ornaments that are seen therein both within and without, it may be seen from the facade that the Tuscan architects strove as much as they could in the doors, the windows, the columns, the arches, and the mouldings, to imitate the good order of the ancients, having in part recovered it from the most ancient temple ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari

... of the Salute is farther assisted by the beautiful flight of steps in front of it down to the canal; and its facade is rich and beautiful of its kind, and was chosen by Turner for the principal object in his well known view of the Grand Canal. The principal faults of the building are the meagre windows in the sides of the cupola, and the ridiculous disguise of the buttresses under the form of colossal scrolls; ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... appeared the legend "Pontiac—Marseilles." The effect of this incongruity was startling. It is related that an inebriated miner, impeded by mud and drink before its door, was found gazing at its remarkable facade with an expression of the deepest despondency. "I hev lived a free life, pardner," he explained thickly to the Samaritan who succored him, "and every time since I've been on this six weeks' jamboree might have kalkilated it would come to this. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... the cliff, and stopped a few seconds later, I emerged through another turnstile and found myself in the lower town again at the foot of the precipice, above which rose the chateau with its imposing facade, the ramparts, and the ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert

... descended from the carriage, Marsa cast a superstitious glance at the facade of the church, a humble facade, with a Gothic porch and cheap stained-glass windows, some of which were broken; and above a plaster tower covered with ivy and surmounted with a roughly carved cross. She entered the church almost trembling, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie

... Note.—The entire facade of the front gable end is called konimbe (which means door) or purume (which means platform). That of the back ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... Jane Bottomly is all facade; the remainder of her is merely an occiputal backyard full of theoretical tin cans and broken bottles. I think we all ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... Vespasian's amphitheatre was approached by muddy little streets, wherein the Red Lion and the Blue Boar, with Somebody's Entire along their front, and "Commercial Room" on their windows; the doctor's house, of substantial red-brick; and the facade of the New Wesleyan Chapel, which we thought very fine, were the chief architectural ornaments: while the Roman populace pottered about in smocks and corduroys, twisting the tails of Roman calves and inviting each ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... the street stood the Academy, with its classic facade and its belfry; midway was the hotel, with the stores, the printing-office, and the churches; and at the other extreme, one of the square white mansions stood advanced from the rank of the rest, at the top of a deep-plunging ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... Vesta, at the north-east corner of the Forum, where it ends, is the magnificent facade of the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, the most perfect of all the Roman temples. There are six splendid Corinthian columns in front and two at the sides, each composed of a single block of green ripple-marked ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... hundred churches. My plan was to sight a spire, and then walk to the root of it, so to speak. In this manner I saw the town very well. The houses were of brick and plaster, the rich carmine-red brick that has made Cracow so beautiful. On each was a beautiful facade, and pediments in renaissance, bas-relief work of cupids, and classic figures with ribands and roses tying among them, seeming to speak, somehow, of the dead princes and the mighty aristocracy which had ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... perfect figures played their parts on the woven surface. Wherever architectural details, such as porticoes or columns, were introduced, these dropped the old designs of "pointed" style or battlements, and took on the classic or the high Renaissance that ornaments the facade of Pavia's Certosa. One by one the wildwood flowers receded before the advance of civilisation, very much as those in the veritable land are wont to do, and their place was taken by a verdure as rich as the South could produce, with heavy foliage ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... Camargue. Both of these buildings have porches splendidly encrusted with sculptures, half classical, half mediaeval, marking the transition from ancient to modern art. But that of S. Gilles is by far the richer and more elaborate. The whole facade of this church is one mass of intricate decoration; Norman arches and carved lions, like those of Lombard architecture, mingling fantastically with Greek scrolls of fruit and flowers, with elegant Corinthian columns jutting out upon ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... was not the large quadrangular barrack-like building which now occupies one side of the square of St. Sulpice. The old seminary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century covered the whole area of what is now the square, and quite concealed Servandoni's facade. The site of the present seminary was formerly occupied by the gardens and by the college of bursars nicknamed the Robertins. The original building disappeared at the time of the Revolution. The chapel, the ceiling of which ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... for the first Mexican governor of California," he said, glancing back at the heavy facade of the church, "so simple and dignified. Yet if Luis Argueello had lived in New England, we should have considered his house of equal importance with his grave and have placed a bronze tablet on the front, but you Westerners have, so ...
— The Lure of San Francisco - A Romance Amid Old Landmarks • Elizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray

... feature of the allotment was, however, the formal overthrow of the fiction that Austria is preponderatingly a German country and not a country preponderatingly Slav with a German dynasty and a German facade. The German constituencies, though allotted in a proportion unduly favourable, left the Germans, with 233 seats, in a permanent minority as compared with the 259 Slav seats. Even with the addition of the "Latin" (Rumanian and Italian) seats the "German-Latin block" amounted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... crept across the open space and huddled against the vine-covered facade of Green Fancy. Barnes was singularly composed and free from nervousness, despite the fact that his whole being tingled with excitement. What was to transpire within the next few minutes? What was to be the end of this daring exploit? Was he to see her, to touch her hand, to carry her off ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... with interest, not afraid of detection, for a small head, on a third story balcony, would be quite lost among the details of the immense facade of the house. He walked toward the stable, and whistled what was evidently a signal, for three romping collies came running to meet him, and were leaping and tumbling about him as he went around the curve of the drive and out of sight. Then ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... of Chartly, Bourchier, and Lonvaine, has Staunton Harold in Leicestershire, of which the park is geometrically planned in the shape of a temple with a facade, and in front of the piece of water is the great church with the square belfry, which belongs ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... church in Lucca, of which the lower half of the facade is of the twelfth century, and the top, built by the Florentines, in the thirteenth, and sealed for their own by two fleur- de-lys, let into its masonry. The most important difference, marking the date, is in the sculpture of the heads which carry the archivolts. But the most palpable difference ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... line of anxious and conscientious effort which I saw not long since on the forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers who has visited us; the same which is so striking on the masks of singing women painted upon the facade of our Great Organ,—that Himalayan home of harmony which you are to see and then die, if you don't live where you can see and hear it often. Many deaths have happened in a neighboring large city from that well-known complaint, Icterus Invidiosorum, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... star-spangled violet dome of air wherein the moon soared serenely, bathing all visible things in a crystalline brilliancy so pure and penetrative, that the finest cuttings on the gigantic grey facade of Notre Dame could be discerned and outlined as distinctly as though every little portion were seen through a magnifying glass. The Cardinal's tall attenuated figure, standing alone and almost in the centre of the square, cast ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... Down each facade a stairway fell, broken by small landings on which a door opened; they dropped to a broad ledge of greyish stone edging the lip of this midnight pool and upon it also fell two wide flights from either side ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... these walls are shrouded in the black winding sheet which, in Paris, falls on every facade to the north. About half-way along the quay at a gloomy archway we see the beginning of the private houses which were built in consequence of the construction of the Pont Neuf in the reign of Henry IV. The Place Royale was a ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... belonged,—a "restored" palace of ancient days, built of rose-marble on the classic lines of Greek architecture. Its "restoration" was not quite finished; numbers of busy workmen were employed on the facade and surrounded loggia; and now and again she turned to watch them with a touch of invisible impatience in her movement. A slight smile sweetened her mouth as she presently perceived one figure approaching her,—a lithe, dark, handsome man, who, when he drew near enough, lifted his ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli

... slowly, "I feel myself trying to like something below the surface in the man. And then I am balked. There seems to be something abysmally deep behind the facade, if you know what I mean. If I think about it much, it seems to me that there is too much surface about Strangwise and not enough foundation! And he smiles... ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams

... represented the north front as it appeared before the last restoration, i.e. we see the handiwork of the eighteenth century and the facade as remodelled under the superintendence of Sir Christopher Wren. The modern front was constructed ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... realising why they had been dislodged; when they looked round for enlightenment they found Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a window on the left side of the road. It was a large window, forming part of the long facade of a gilt and palatial public-house; it was the part reserved for respectable dining, and labelled "Restaurant." This window, like all the rest along the frontage of the hotel, was of frosted and figured glass; but in the middle of it was a big, black smash, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... that of the Odynerus,[2] and curved like it, but of the width and length of a man's finger. When the community is a populous one, we stand amazed at the rustic ornamentation formed by all these stalactites of clay hanging from the facade. The other, A. pilipes, who is very much more frequent, leaves the opening of her corridor bare. The chinks between the stones in old walls and abandoned hovels, the surfaces of excavations in soft sandstone or marl, are found suitable ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... very much larger than he had imagined; the starlight had illuminated only a small portion of its white facade, tricking him; for this was almost a palace—one of those fine vigorously designed mansions, so imposing in simplicity, nicknamed by ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... old men. There were the old men who lived with their married sons and daughters-in-law or married daughters and sons-in-law. Then there were the old men who lived in the Grant Home for Aged Gentlemen. You saw its fine red-brick facade through the trees at the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber

... were built of grey granite, and presented, when seen from the courtyard below, tiers of little windows set with monotonous regularity in discoloured walls. The fourth was evidently also of granite, but at some recent period an attempt had been made to cover its forbidding facade with plaster. The workmen had wearied of their good intent and had left off when their labours were half finished, which gave the building the gruesome appearance of having been half skinned. Flush with the four sides of the square ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace

... was still. From the house not the slightest sound reached him. He began cautiously to advance. At the corner of an alley all the house suddenly burst upon him with its dusky facade. In two windows only on the upper story were lights glimmering. In Liza's apartment a candle was burning behind the white blind, and in Marfa Timofeevna's bed-room glowed the red flame of the small ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... by this escarpment varies from 3,000 to more than 4,000 feet. The step from the lowlands to the highlands which is here called the Mogollon Escarpment is not a simple line of cliffs, but is a complicated and irregular facade presented to the southwest. Its different portions have been named by the people living below as distinct mountains, as Shiwits Mountains, Mogollon Mountains, Pinal Mountains, Sierra Calitro, etc., but they all rise to the summit of the same ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell

... flushed most pinkly, Ming-Y, gazing through the groves, uttered a cry of dismay. Where the azure-tiled roof had risen against the sky, there was now only the blue emptiness of air; where the green-and-gold facade had been, there was visible only the flickering of leaves under the aureate autumn light; and where the broad terrace had extended, could be discerned only a ruin,—a tomb so ancient, so deeply gnawed by moss, that the name graven upon it was no longer decipherable. The home ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... a salient object in the heavens surpassing the stony eminences which surrounded it, rose the tall spire of the twin Houses of Parliament. Upon its top swung a gilded weathercock; while about a portion of its base stood a maze of scaffolding, the facade of the building having during the last few months been under repair. There seemed, however, for the moment, to be no workmen upon it. Presently, as he gazed vacantly and without intent, something that moved ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... the Middle Ages, represented by the mysterious Tour Bramafam, the Tour des Prisons, or the Tour du Lepreux, round which Xavier Maistre wrote his pathetic dialogue. Then, there was the cathedral with its extraordinary painted facade, like a great coloured picture-book; and the tall cross, straddling a spring in a paved street, put up in thanksgiving by the Aostans when they joyfully saw Calvin's back for the ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... of silence which seems to be peopled with whispering spirits we strode forward along the elm avenue. It was very dark where the moon failed to penetrate. The house, low and rambling, came into view, its facade bathed in silver light. Two of the visible windows were illuminated. A sort of ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer

... structure is uninteresting, may have recourse to a subsidiary construction. The facade, or a part of it, or the interior may still have a natural form that lends itself to elaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore or even conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirely beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... their richly wrought transepts and their pinnacled spires. Not trailing along the ground like the Greek temple or the Arab mosque—of the earth, earthy—but leading the soul heavenward with their upward flow of harmony. Vast Bibles of stone, bearing on lofty facade and on buttressed flank the sculptured details of Holy Writ—silent lessons, but not lost upon the rude though reverent men who dwelt within their shadow. It is sad to think that there can never be any more cathedrals. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... say, M'Collop, how gets on the Duke of What-d'ye-call-'em starving in the castle?—Gandish says it's very good." The lad retires to a group of artists. Mr. Honeyman comes up with a faint smile playing on his features, like moonlight on the facade ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... watched the silver of full moons shining on the spectral white columns that crowned "Elm Bluff", the fire of setting suns that blazed ruby-red as Gubbio wine, along the line of casements that pierced the front facade, a bristling perpetual reminder of the tragedy that cried to heaven for vengeance. She learned exactly where to expect the first glimpse of the slender opal crescent in the primrose west; followed its waxing brilliance as it sailed out of the green bights of the pine forest, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... of the facade was broken in the centre by the great Puerta del Perdon, an enormous and very deeply-recessed Gothic arch, which narrowed as it receded by the gradations of its mouldings, adorned by statues of apostles, under open-worked ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... More, its stately architecture, embellished by the prelate with a facade of double arches, painted and blazoned somewhat in the fashion of certain old Italian houses, much dazzled Marmaduke. And the splendour of the archbishop's retinue—less martial indeed than Warwick's—was yet ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of Portland stone, which London smoke alternately blackens and calcines; and each facade has four Corinthian pilasters, an entablature, and an arched pediment. On the west (Strand) side, in two niches, stand, as eternal sentries, Charles I. and Charles II., in Roman costume. Charles I. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... landscaped twenty years before, occupied a square block in solitary grandeur, the show place of Chippewa. In architectural style it was an impartial mixture of Norman castle, French chateau, and Rhenish Schloss, with a dash of Coney Island about its facade. It represented Old Man Hatton's realized dream of ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... foreground was recognizable as such by the shape and size of its ragged walls, and by a half-smashed image of the Virgin and Child which slanted out at a perilous angle above its facade. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune

... monuments of the architecture of the Middle Ages than the Grande Place of Brussels,—the rich facade of the Hotel de Ville, with its long colonnade of graceful arches, upon every keystone of which some grim, grotesque head is peering; the massive cornices; the heavy corbels carved into ten thousand strange and uncouth fancies; but finer than all, the taper and stately spire, fretted and ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever



Words linked to "Facade" :   front, frontispiece, misrepresentation, deception, deceit



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