Wedding-cake style

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 details 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, a former zoning code which forced buildings to reduce their shadows at street level by employing setbacks, resulting in a ziggurat profile. 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.