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Black Hole of Calcutta
Black Hole of Calcutta A prison room at Fort William, Calcutta, India, so called after the alleged suffocation there in 1756 of some English prisoners. They had been incarcerated by the nawab, Siraj ud-Daula, in retaliation for extending the fort against previous agreements. The incident has an impo...
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pendentive
pendentive in architecture, a constructive device permitting the placing of a circular dome over a square room or an elliptical dome over a rectangular room. The pendentives, which are triangular segments of a sphere, taper to points at the bottom and spread at the top to establish the continuous c...
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John Gerard Braine
John Gerard Braine 1922-86, English novelist, b. Bradford, Yorkshire. With his first novel, Room at the Top (1957), Braine established himself as one of England's angry young men . This novel bitterly chronicles the rise of a young working-class man into the upper middle class of an English fact...
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bungalow
bungalow [Indian bangla, =house], dwelling built in a style developed from that of a form of rural house in India. The original bungalow typically has one story, few rooms, and a maximum of cross drafts, with high ceilings, unusually large window and door openings, and verandas on all sides to sha...
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Pieter de Hooch
Pieter de Hooch , b. c.1629, d. after 1677, Dutch genre painter. He worked in Delft, Leiden, and Amsterdam, painting intimate interiors that may have been influenced by those of Vermeer. Usually he preferred to paint rooms opening into other rooms or to the outdoors, intriguing the imagination with ...
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pageant
pageant modern dramatic spectacle or procession celebrating a special occasion or an event in the history of a locality. In medieval times the word pageant had meant the wagon or the movable stage on which one scene of a mystery or miracle play was performed. The pageant was built on wheels and...
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deliquescence
deliquescence , conversion of a solid substance into a liquid as a result of absorption of water vapor from the air. Since impurities in a solid lower its melting point, the absorbed water causes a decrease in the normal melting point of the solid. If enough water is absorbed to lower the melting po...
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Henri Labrouste
Henri Labrouste , 1801-75, French architect. He was among the first to make effective architectural use of metal construction, as in his treatment of the reading room of the Bibliothèque Ste Geneviève (1843-50), Paris, in which the ceiling domes were supported upon an exposed iron fram...
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Philip Wilson Steer
Philip Wilson Steer 1860-1942, English landscape painter. Steer worked largely in the tradition of French impressionist painting and was considered the greatest English landscape painter of his day. He brought to his subjects a considerable understanding of pattern, color, space, and especially lig...
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heating
heating means of making a building comfortably warm relative to a colder outside temperature. Old, primitive methods of heating a building or a room within it include the open fire, the fireplace, and the stove . In ancient Rome a heating system, called a hypocaust, warmed a building by passing ho...
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