Masonic Facade

William Mangnall (1863) Freemasons Hall, Cooper Street, Manchester

Facade as Face: Rome, London, Villefranche-sur-Mer

San Giovanni della Pigna, Rome

Clore Gallery, London (James Stirling)

Saint-Pierre, Villefranche-sur-Mer (Jean Cocteau)

Palazzo Davanzati, Florence

Facade and campanile: the Duomo at Trani

Vicentine Void: the''House of Palladio" facade

Venetian Church Facades

Santa Maria and San Donato, Murano


San Giacomo dall' Orio


Madonna del Orto

Facade, surface and depth: Scuola Grande di San Marco

This unusual example from Venice might serve to express how the new methods of depicting and conceiving of urban space began to appear in cities during the fifteenth century. The aesthetic problem of the perspectival articulation of an urban wall received a singular treatment at Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Here a facade was created for the Scuola Grande di San Marco (1489-94) where through the iconographic programme of a series of sculpted marble low relief panels, a virtual extension to the actual space was created which mediated between the life of the city and that of its patron saint. It is all the more extraordinary because of the sober but essentially unadorned facade of the gothic basilica. The scuola’s position as one of the great confraternities of the city meant the ostentatious display of wealth was seen within a specific social context of charitable provision. At ground level, pairings of scenes in barrel vaulted and flat ceilinged spaces by Pietro and Tullio Lombardo are carved from the wall plane in controlled perspectives which resonate with the antique language of the equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni which stands in the campo.The length of the facade with its six bays was such that the perspective illusion takes place around two centres and with two different horizon lines.

Facade on the forum: San Michele in Lucca

San Michele sits on the site of the forum of the original Roman settlement. The piazza is dominated by the tiered and columned facade of the church and its delicate campanile.

Minor Architecture in Venice

Campo Santa Margherita has several examples of this type of modest palazzo with their typically delicate facades.

Gothic versus Classic: two facades

As examples of epiphanic walls, neither of these two examples give too much away. Above, the facade of Sant' Antonio ('il Santo') in Padua, photographed on Good Friday, presents an austere brick face to the world which rehearses the basic theme of the interior. Softer in character San Trovaso (Santi Gervasio e Protasio) in Venice, photographed on Easter Sunday has a stucco surface on which to mark an harmonic geometrical composition.

Transformations between exterior and interior: Santa Maria Maddalena, Rome

During the seventeenth century the political system of absolutism expressed itself in urban form through the creation of spaces, buildings and interiors which sought to represent cosmic order within the constrained and irregular pattern of the city. A commercial motive animated the development of Piazza Santa Maria Maddalena, (c. 1695-1735) although the venerability of its location north of the Pantheon resulted in a morphologically conventional if stylistically unusual design. The ensemble of piazza, facade and interior exhibits the fluid ingenuity with which designers attempted to make a form of continuity between everyday experience and the ideal, manifested in full-bodied urban theatricality which is increasingly elaborate in its decoration.