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:
“Everything ponderous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long- winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among Germans—forgive me the fact that even Goethe’s prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, being a reflection of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and a reflection of German taste at a time when there still was a “German taste”Ma rococo taste in moribus et artibus.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)