In architecture, a "wedding-cake style" is an informal reference to buildings with many distinct tiers, each set back from the one below, resulting in a shape like a wedding cake, that are richly ornamented with classicising detail, as if made in sugar icing.
In Italy, the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II is in "wedding cake style".
The British wedding-cake style was created by Sir Christopher Wren, who often placed a steeple at the top of a series of classically-details diminishing lower stages (illustration).
In the United States, the style has been predominant in New York City, thanks to the 1916 Zoning Resolution, a former zoning code which forced buildings to reduce their shadows at street level by employing setbacks, resulting in a ziggurat profile.
In Russia, the "wedding-cake style" supercharged with boldly-scaled classical detailing is a typical feature of Stalinist architecture.
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)