Churrigueresque

Churrigueresque is an extremely ornate Spanish Baroque architectural style named after the Churriguera family of Madrid, above all Jose Benito de Churriguera, who lived from 1665 to 1725 and worked chiefly as a designer of massive gilded retablos, the elaborately carved altarpieces of Spanish churches, before his family's decorative vocabulary was extended into architecture itself. Its most distinctive device is the estipite, a pilaster shaped like an inverted, tapering obelisk or pyramid stacked in sculptural sections, used to frame doorways and facades with dense, almost overwhelming surface ornament of scrolls, foliage and figures rather than restrained classical proportion. The style spread from Spain to its American colonies, where it produced some of the movement's most celebrated works, including the Metropolitan Tabernacle adjoining Mexico City Cathedral, designed by the architect Lorenzo Rodriguez and completed in 1760, its facade covered edge to edge in estipite pilasters and sculpted ornament. Churrigueresque is generally treated as the culminating, most exuberant phase of Spanish and colonial Spanish American Baroque architecture before Neoclassicism displaced it in the later eighteenth century.