Herrerian Architecture

The Herrerian style is the concluding phase of Spanish Renaissance architecture, developed during the final third of the sixteenth century under King Philip II and named for the architect Juan de Herrera, who lived from 1530 to 1597. It marks a progression from the ornate Plateresque style toward severe, geometrically rigorous design, so thoroughly stripped of ornament that it became known in Spanish as the estilo desornamentado, or unornamented style, favoring clean cubic volumes arranged in symmetrical, strongly horizontal compositions. The style originated with the Monastery of El Escorial, begun in 1563 and completed in 1584, whose design Herrera took over and reorganized following the death of the original architect Juan Bautista de Toledo; Herrera's own 1579 appointment as Crown Inspector of Monuments then helped spread the style across Spain. Francisco de Mora, Herrera's student and the architect of the Ducal Palace of Lerma, became the style's other principal practitioner, and Herrerian design remained the official architectural language of the Spanish Habsburgs, in both Spain and Spanish America, well into the seventeenth century before giving way to the Baroque.