Fire stops for such building joints can be qualified, too. The melting point of aluminium, 660 ☌ (1,220 ☏), is typically reached within minutes of the start of a fire. Whether rated or not, fire protection is always a design consideration. In recent years more lavish materials such as titanium have sometimes been used, but due to their cost and susceptibility to panel edge staining these have not been popular. In general, the façade systems that are suspended or attached to the precast concrete slabs will be made from aluminium (powder coated or anodized) or stainless steel. The façade can at times be required to have a fire-resistance rating, for instance, if two buildings are very close together, to lower the likelihood of fire spreading from one building to another. Examples include curtain walls and precast concrete walls. In modern high rise building, the exterior walls are often suspended from the concrete floor slabs.
This new construction has happened also in other places: in Santiago de Compostela the 3-metres-deep Casa do Cabido was built to match the architectural order of the square, and the main Churrigueresque façade of the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, facing the Praza do Obradoiro, is actually encasing and concealing the older Portico of Glory.
For example, in the city of Bath, The Bunch of Grapes in Westgate Street appears to be a Georgian building, but the appearance is only skin deep and some of the interior rooms still have Jacobean plasterwork ceilings. It was quite common in the Georgian period for existing houses in English towns to be given a fashionable new façade. The earliest usage recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary is 1656. The word is a loanword from the French façade, which in turn comes from the Italian facciata, from faccia meaning face, ultimately from post-classical Latin facia.