Architectural terracotta

Architectural terracotta refers either to decorated ceramic elements such as antefixes and revetments, usually brightly painted, which made a large contribution to the appearance of temples and other buildings in the classical architecture of Europe, as well as in the Ancient Near East, or to forms of ceramic skins used to surface buildings from the 19th century onwards. In the latter sense unglazed architectural terracotta became fashionable as an architectural ceramic construction material in England in the 1860s, and in the United States in the 1870s. Glazed architectural terracotta was developed a little later. Both were generally used as a decorative skin to cover or supplement brick and tiles of similar colour in late Victorian buildings.

Terracotta had been used architecturally before this in Germany from 1824 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Edmund Sharpe designed and oversaw the construction of the first church built almost exclusively of the material, St Stephen and All Martyrs' Church, Lever Bridge in Bolton, erected 1842–45. Henry Cole, secretary to the Science and Arts Department of the UK adopted terracotta for the building which is now the Victoria and Albert Museum (1859–71) and then the Royal Albert Hall (1867–71), both in London. Alfred Waterhouse used it in his designs when in business in Manchester from 1853 and London from 1865. He used a combination of buff and blue-grey terracotta in his Natural History Museum in London. The colour of terracotta varies with the source of the clay. In Britain, London clay gives a pale pink or buff colour, whereas the Ruabon (North Wales) clay gives a bright red.

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