Cruciform plan

Cruciform means having the shape of a cross or Christian cross.

Christian churches are commonly described as having a cruciform architecture. In Early Christian, Byzantine and other Eastern Orthodox forms of church architecture this is likely to mean a tetraconch plan, a Greek cross, with arms of equal length or, later, a cross-in-square plan.

In the Western churches, a cruciform architecture usually, though not exclusively, means a church built with the layout developed in Gothic architecture. This layout comprises the following:

In churches that are not oriented with the altar at the geographical east end, it is usual to refer to the altar end as "liturgical east" and so forth.

Another example of ancient cruciform architecture can be found in Herod's temple, the second Jewish temple.

DNA can undergo transitions to form a cruciform shape, otherwise known as a Holliday junction. This structure is important for the critical biological processes of DNA recombination and repair mutations that occur in the cell.

A cruciform joint is a specific joint in which 4 spaces are created by the welding of 3 plates of metal at right angles.

A cruciform manuscript was a form of Anglo-Saxon / Insular manuscript written with the words in a block shaped like a cross.

In music, a melody of four pitches where a straight line drawn between the outer pair bisects a straight line drawn between the inner pair, thus forming a cross (as in the red lines in the example to the right). In its simplest form, the cruciform melody is a changing tone, where the melody ascends or descends by step, skips below or above the first pitch, then returns to the first pitch by step. Often representative of the Christian cross, such melodies are cruciform in their retrogrades or inversions. Johann Sebastian Bach, whose last name may be represented in tones through a musical cryptogram known as the BACH motif that is a cruciform melody, employed the device extensively. The subject of the fugue in c-sharp minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I is cruciform. See also: Cross motif.

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