Rustication (architecture)

[2] Rustication was used in ancient times, but became especially popular in the revived classical styles of Italian Renaissance architecture and that of subsequent periods, particularly in the lower floors of secular buildings.

In some buildings, such as the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (begun 1298) something other than cost-saving is at play, and this may be the association of the technique with the display of power and strength, from its use in military architecture.

[4] It was generally used for secular buildings, and has always remained uncommon in churches, perhaps through a lingering association with the architecture of military power; there are exceptions, such as St Giles in the Fields, London (1730–34).

The ground floor has an irregular and genuinely rugged appearance, with a variation in the degree to which parts of the faces of blocks project from the wall that is rarely equalled later.

In Rome, Donato Bramante's Palazzo Caprini ("House of Raphael", by 1510, now destroyed) provided a standard model for the integration of rustication with the orders.

[5] The first major Renaissance building in Spain, the Palace of Charles V in Granada (1527), had a deeply rusticated ground floor facade with regular rounded cushions.

In his Banqueting House in London (1619), Inigo Jones gave a lightly rusticated surface texture to emphasize the blocks on both storeys, and to unify them behind his orders of pilasters and columns.

[8] Rustication therefore often reverses the patterns of medieval and later vernacular architecture, where roughly dressed wall surfaces often contrast with ashlar quoins and frames to openings.

[7] Typically, rustication after 1700 is highly regular, with the front faces of blocks flat even when worked in patterns, as opposed to the real unevenness often seen in the 16th-century examples.

The Baroque garden front of the Palazzo Pitti achieves a striking effect, not often copied, by using extensive "blocking", both rounded and rectangular, on the shafts of its columns and pilasters.

The technique is still sometimes used in architecture of a broadly Modernist character, especially in city centre streets where it helps modern buildings blend with older ones with rustication.

Although essentially a technique for stone masonry, rustication can be imitated in brick and stucco,[7] which began as early as Bramante's Palazzo Caprini and was common in smaller houses in Georgian architecture, and also in wood (see below), which is mainly found in British America.

In garden architecture, where water was to flow over or near the surface, a vertically oriented pattern evoking hanging pond-weed or algae, or icicles ("frost-work") is sometimes used.

In the spectacular late 15th-century gateway to the Palacio de Jabalquinto in Baeza, Andalucia, small widely spaced pyramids cover one of the many zones with fancy carved elements, projecting from a wall otherwise in ashlar.

The large Černín Palace in Prague (1660s) repeats the Kremlin formula of a broad zone of diamonds across the middle height of the facade, though like the towers in Milan these do not come to a point.

This process became popular in 18th century New England to translate the features of Palladian architecture to the house-carpenter's idiom: in Virginia Monticello and Mount Vernon both made use of this technique.

In Central Europe, especially the Czech Republic, feigned rustication in sgraffito (decoration by scraping away one colour of coating on an exterior to show another beneath) is a feature from the late Renaissance onwards, continuing into the 20th century.