Ceilings: History and Purpose
A ceiling is the overhead surface or surfaces over a area, and the underside of a floor or a roof. Ceilings are mostly utilized to cover floor and roof construction. They have been favourite places for decor from the earliest periods: either in coating the flat surface, in bringing out the structural members of roof or floor, or by commandeering it as a field for an allover pattern of relief.
Only a little is understood of ancient Greek ceilings, but Roman ceilings were richly designed with relief as well as painting, as is seen at the vault soffits of Pompeian baths. In the Gothic period, the general tendency to utilize structural parts decoratively then came to the development of the beamed ceiling, for which huge cross-girders support smaller floor beams at right angles to them, beams and girders being strongly chamfered and molded and often painted in decorative colours.
In the Renaissance, ceiling design was moved to its highest peak of uniqueness and difference. Three forms were developed. The first was the coffered ceiling, in the delicate design of which the Italian Renaissance architects far outdid their Roman prototypes. Circular, square, octagonal, and L-shaped coffers abounded, with their edges richly carved and the field of each coffer flourished with a rosette. The second type consisted of ceilings entirely or in parts vaulted, often with arched intersections, with painted bands foregrounding the architectural design and with pictures filling the remainder of the area. The loggia of the Farnesina villa in Rome, decorated by Raphael and Giulio Romano, is a great demonstration of this. In the Baroque period, amazing figures in heavy relief, scrolls, cartouches, and garlands were also utilized to decorate ceilings of this kind. The Pitti Palace in Florence and many French ceilings in the Louis XIV style demonstrate this. In the third kind, which was notably characteristic of Venice, the ceiling became a huge framed picture, like in the Doges’ Palace.
In contemporary architecture ceilings are sometimes divided into two major kinds — the suspended (or hung) ceiling and the exposed ceiling. With ceilings hung at some distance underneath the structural members, some architects have worked to conceal super amounts of mechanical and electrical equipment, such as electrical conduits, air-conditioning ducts, water pipes, sewage lines, and lighting fixtures. Many suspended ceilings feature a lightweight metal grid suspended from the structure by wires or rods to hold up plasterboard sheets or acoustical tiles.
Other architects, bringing out the aesthetic of the exposed structural system, take enjoyment in revealing the mechanical and electrical equipment. In response to this design, some structural systems have been created that have a deliberately expressive power in themselves and make for popular ceilings.
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