Rustication: the stony face of the countryside

Raw, massive stone architecture, or rustication, came into early modern thinking through its use in medieval Florence, who used their favorable, local stone resources in their city walls, fortresses and public buildings. The rough, blocked-out facades of the Palazzo Vecchio (city hall) set a powerful precedent for monumental building facades, a trend brought to a high-art form in Rome by Bramante in the Palazzo Caprini (1510). The Romans, eager to taut their urban heritage, coined the term rustico in association with the people of Florence, who, in their Etruscan origin, were 'rude', simplistic country folk (rustico, from the Latin rus/ruris, meaning 'countryside').

It was Sebastiano Serlio who first theorized the concept, connecting fractured stone surfaces to the simple, straight-forwardness of the Tuscan Order, in what has come to be called rustication (1540's). Serlio's theory allowed for rough and blocky architectural features, now linked to moral order of the countryside, to find a home among the intellectually refined. Since then, rustication has been invoked in many contexts, appropriated by public and bourgeoise interests alike to communicate the non-corrupt, aesthetic clarity of arcadian values. In Scandinavia, for example, urban, rusticated facades became a hallmark detail of national romantic, public architecture as a coded reference to the link between the people (folk) and the original values born from the national soil. Rustication presented an 'honest' ornamental texture that gave the impression of being harvested directly from the countryside and placed without the need of sophisticated (urban) cutting machines. Back in Rome, also forming a new national architecture, buildings such as the Palace of Justice (Guglielmo Calderini, 1884) relied on heavy rustication to present a powerful, monumental facade of 'refined-roughness', invoking the original, pre-urban relation between the nation and the natural-born rights of its citizens.