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120 Wall Street in New York, a skyscraper from 1930, is a typical example of wedding-cake architecture.
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, and may also apply to buildings that are richly ornamented, 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 detailed diminishing lower stages as with St. Paul's Cathedral.
- In the United States, the style has been predominant in New York City, thanks to the 1916 Zoning Resolution,[1] a former zoning code which forced buildings to reduce their shadows at street level by employing setbacks, resulting in a ziggurat profile.[2] The dome of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. is also described as being of wedding-cake style.
- In Russia, the wedding-cake style supercharged with boldly scaled classical detailing is a typical feature of Stalinist architecture.
References
- ^ Dunlap, David W. (25 July 2016). "Zoning Arrived 100 Years Ago. It Changed New York City Forever". Retrieved 17 January 2017 – via NYTimes.com.
- ^ "Top Ten New York Architecture". Retrieved 17 January 2017.