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Profile for mouldings

“Some interactive software for designing architectural profiles such as architraves, cornices etc..”

What's it all about?

Mouldings are those built-up strips of wood, plaster or stone you see around doorways, windows, paintings and all over classical architecture as a cornice or architrave. Generally they are made up of smaller shapes; these basic forms are Caveto (a concave ‘groove'), Ovulo (a ‘bulge'), Ogee (an 's’ curve with vertical ends) and Cyma (an 's’ curve with horizontal ends).

There is a vast amount of misunderstanding and confusion about moulding design. So much so, that modern-day architects and designers nearly always get them disastrously wrong – Often their attempts are so bad that many architects insist that they shouldn't even be attempted by anyone.

In fact, the design of a moulding is beautifully simple – So long as the designer or architect doesn't try to think of it as a collection of three dimensional sections, rather she should design it as a collection of light and shaded bands.

Not many people understand this. You can experiment with the software on this page and figure it out for yourself.

Screenshots

Profile Screengrab 01

Figure 1. A Simple compound moulding, this consists of: A large Caveto section in the middle (defined by a dark-to-light gradient from top-to-bottom). At the top is a small Ovulo section (defined by a light-to-dark gradient). At the bottom is a small Ogee section (defined by a white field with a dark band in the centre).

Profile Screengrab 02

Figure 2. A complex compound moulding, similar to a classical Architrave

Download

This software was written six years ago, I've only just got round to putting it on the web :-) (March 2002). Apologies for only providing a Windows version (Windows and Visual Basic is all I had at the time), however it seems to work perfectly on linux with the Wine Windows emulator.

You can Download a zip-archive of the software, it's not very big and includes full sources and example files. Just unzip the archive and run PROFILE.EXE. It's all fairly self explanatory.

If you find this useful, please add a comment below and let me know, I think it's Neat Stuff.

Zip Compressed Archive Profile (274kB)

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This document was last modified on 2015-05-17 22:16:45.
Bruno Postle