Wedding-cake style

In architecture, wedding-cake style is an informal term for buildings with many distinct tiers, each set back from the one below, producing a shape like a wedding cake, and is also applied to buildings that are richly ornamented as if made in sugar icing. Examples include the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in Italy and, in Britain, the churches of Sir Christopher Wren such as St. Paul's Cathedral, which place a steeple atop a series of classically detailed diminishing stages. In the United States the style became predominant in New York City after the 1916 Zoning Resolution forced buildings to use setbacks to reduce shadows at street level, producing a ziggurat profile that strongly influenced Art Deco buildings there and elsewhere, while a bolder classically detailed version of the style is also a typical feature of Stalinist architecture in Russia; the dome of the United States Capitol is likewise described as wedding-cake style.