Curios
Stuff (I’m using that word far too much) that doesn’t yet have a home elsewhere.
Vermiculated rustication
For a while I’ve been fascinated (well, intrigued at least) with the stonework pattern seen on some buildings. Usually on the ground floor of large buildings like banks, government offices, that sort of thing. I even started taking photographs of it.
So, being an inquisitive sort of bloke, I started pestering various institutions with my photos, and finally found out. The form of decoration is known as ‘rustication’, a term also used in some very posh colleges to describe the process of banning a student from college grounds for misbehaiour!
Rustication started in Roman times (I believe) and was actually a sign of lazy builders (a pleonasm or tautology if ever there was one.) Stone on the exterior of upper floors of a building would be ‘dressed’ or finished off nice and smooth, as the building progressed. But once the scaffolding was down, the stone on the exterior of the ground floor could be left until workers had time to finish dressing it off (”I’ll be back next Tuesday with a couple of the lads Mrs. Ceasar. Couple of hours tops. Lovely job. To you, three hundred denarii.”)
Over time, this unfinished look on the ground floor actually became fashionable, and worked its way into other form of architecture. There are many forms of rustication, including ‘vermiculated’ (worm-like carvings in the stone) ‘reticulated’ (net-like carvings), banded, and prismatic.
