Streetscapes - A Glossary for Architectural Rubberneckers - NYTimes.com A broken pediment at 775 Park Avenue, designed by Rosario Candela. YOU can be an insufferable know-it-all with architectural terminology: "Oh, that's not a cyma recta, it's a cyma reversa." But, as with birds in a forest or the varieties of beer, more basic identifications enrich the understanding of the network of architecture that overlays our city. Here are four terms you'll see represented on the streets of New York, supplementing those of the Streetscapes column of April 29. BROKEN PEDIMENT A pediment is the thing on the top of a doorway, window or entire facade. But, watch out, it's not a cornice. A broken pediment is open in the center, as if something had taken a very neat bite out of it. On a building, broken pediments can be curved or triangular. Sometimes the sides are shaped like a swan's neck - that's the deluxe model. Occasionally the bottom is broken open; that's an open pediment. Broken pediments are often filled with some sort of motif - a cornucopia here, a lion's head there. A magnificent opportunity was lost with Philip Johnson's AT&T building of 1984, at Madison and 56th Street. It has the largest broken pediment in New York, and he left it bare! What a waste - could have been a Princess phone in there! Want to find a broken pediment? Look for any building by Rosario Candela; he never met a broken pediment he didn't like, starting with his first commission in 1922. GIBBS SURROUND James Gibbs gave his name (or more likely had it taken from him) to the Gibbs surround, where blocklike forms interrupt the molding around a door or window. It was very big in the 18th century, when he practiced, and the architectural historian Calder Loth shows some mind-bending European examples on his blog for Feb. 1, 2011, at blog.classicist.org. We have Gibbs surrounds, too, as with the side doors of the 1764 St. Paul's Chapel at Broadway and Fulton. They also show up on early high-end 19th-century row houses, as on three on St. Marks Place, Nos. 4, 20 and 25. But then you can also find them a block away along Second Avenue on apartment houses built at the turn of the last century. ANTHEMION The anthemion and its close cousin the palmette together constitute the secret handshake, the coded lapel pin, the whispered password of the resurgent classical movement. There is disagreement among experts as to the exact definition, but it looks like a spread of palm or honeysuckle leaves. You normally have to look up to see this motif, as with Alfred Zucker's temple-topped Baudouine loft building at Broadway and 28th Street. But several dozen may be seen at ground level at the 1897 Bowling Green Building at 5-11 Broadway; The Real Estate Record and Guide archly sniffed that it had "more anthemia than any other work with which we are acquainted." There may be 100 on the entire structure. The Palladio Awards, given for excellence in traditional building, claim the palmette for a symbol. STEPPED GABLE There is just something so huggable about Dutch or stepped gables, which is strange because my mother's side is Dutch and there's not a huggable one in the bunch. Presumably stepped gables became popular in Belgium and Holland because they allowed access to the peak of the roof, although they are often so heavily encrusted with ornament you'd have to be Spiderman to get to the top. In New York this kind of gable pops up on stables and on West End Avenue, where a conscious revival of Dutch architecture got under way in the 1890s with two dozen row houses and two big schools. The stepped gable may have been a nativist, Knickerbocker statement, in snobbish opposition to the tide of immigrants coming to our shores, but it seems more likely that it caught on as a branding device; pretty much any buyer is acceptable to a real estate developer. There is so much more: squinch, nogging - how about corpse gate? An excellent new guide to architectural terminology is Owen Hopkins's "Reading Architecture: A Visual Lexicon" (Laurence King Publishing, 2012), which will get you nicely through every block in New York.