Spandrel

The design of organisations and products Go Premium Making legal contracts a better experience Index — Click ᐅ to expand: Design Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Spandrel
/ˈspændrᵊl/ (n.)
A roughly triangular space, between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame, between the tops of two adjacent arches, or one of the four spaces between a circle within a square. They are frequently filled with decorative elements.

Made famous by the late great Stephen Jay Gould in his neo-Darwinist-bunking paper The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme, which you absolutely must read.

See also

• Law firm panel
• Stephen Jay Gould