The light, intimate, asymmetrical final phase of the Baroque: rooms and churches dissolved in white and gold stucco, pastel colour, mirrors and shell-like rocaille ornament, with walls and ceilings flowing into one another.
Rococo began not in architecture but in interior decoration, in the Paris town houses (hôtels) of the Regency after the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Designers such as Nicolas Pineau and Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier replaced the heavy classical panelling of Versailles with light, asymmetrical frames of C- and S-curves, shells, rocks and foliage: rocaille, from which the style takes its name. The orders almost vanish from interiors; walls become panels of mirror and carved wood, and ceilings are joined to walls by curving coves.
In the German-speaking lands the style became a total architecture. François de Cuvilliés’ Amalienburg hunting lodge at Nymphenburg (1734–39) is a single circular mirrored room of silver on blue. In the pilgrimage churches of Bavaria and Franconia, such as Dominikus Zimmermann’s Wieskirche (1745–54) and Balthasar Neumann’s Vierzehnheiligen (1743–72), plans built of interlocking ovals (The oval plan) are flooded with light from large clear windows, the structure hidden under white and gold stucco, and ceilings painted as open heavens.
Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci at Potsdam (1745–47) and Rastrelli’s palaces for the Russian empresses carried the style north and east. By the 1750s, however, critics in France were already attacking it as frivolous and irrational; Laugier’s Essai of 1753 (Licences to avoid) and the rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquity turned taste towards Neoclassicism, and by 1780 the Rococo was over except in provincial church interiors.