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Roof lantern
Architectural element / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A roof lantern is a daylighting architectural element. Architectural lanterns are part of a larger roof and provide natural light into the space or room below. In contemporary use it is an architectural skylight structure.
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A lantern roof will generally mean just the roof of a lantern structure in the West, but has a special meaning in Indian architecture (mostly Buddhist, and stretching into Central Asia and eastern China), where it means a dome-like roof raised by sets of four straight beams placed above each other, "arranged in diminishing squares", and rotated with each set. Normally such a "lantern" is enclosed and provides no light at all.[2]
The term roof top lantern is sometimes used to describe the lamps on roofs of taxis in Japan, designed to reflect the cultural heritage of Japanese paper lanterns.