HISTORY OF WESTERN ARCHITECTURE
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The history of architecture traces the changes in architecture through various traditions, regions,
overarching stylistic trends, and dates. The branches of architecture are civil, sacred, naval,
military, and landscape architecture.
Medieval architecture
Surviving examples of medieval secular architecture mainly served for defense. Castles and
fortified walls provide the most notable remaining non-religious examples of medieval
architecture. Windows gained a cross-shape for more than decorative purposes: they provided a
perfect fit for a crossbowman to safely shoot at invaders from inside. Crenellation walls
(battlements) provided shelters for archers on the roofs to hide behind when not shooting.
Pre-Romanesque
Western European architecture in the Early Middle Ages may be divided into Early Christian and
Pre-Romanesque, including Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian, and Asturian. While these
terms are problematic, they nonetheless serve adequately as entries into the era. Considerations
that enter into histories of each period include Trachtenberg’s “historicising” and “modernising”
elements, Italian versus northern, Spanish, and Byzantine elements, and especially the religious
and political maneuverings between kings, popes, and various ecclesiastic officials.
Romanesque
Romanesque, prevalent in medieval Europe during the 11th and 12th centuries, was the first pan-
European style since Roman Imperial architecture and examples are found in every part of the
continent. The term was not contemporary with the art it describes, but rather, is an invention of
modern scholarship based on its similarity to Roman architecture in forms and materials.
Romanesque is characterized by a use of round or slightly pointed arches, barrel vaults, and
cruciform piers supporting vaults.
Gothic
The various elements of Gothic architecture emerged in a number of 11th- and 12th-century
building projects, particularly in the Île de France area, but were first combined to form what we
would now recognise as a distinctively Gothic style at the 12th century abbey church of Saint-
Denis in Saint-Denis, near Paris. Verticality is emphasized in Gothic architecture, which features
almost skeletal stone structures with great expanses of glass, pared-down wall surfaces supported
by external flying buttresses, pointed arches using the ogive shape, ribbed stone vaults, clustered
columns, pinnacles and sharply pointed spires. Windows contain beautiful stained glass, showing
stories from the Bible and from lives of saints. Such advances in design allowed cathedrals to
rise taller than ever, and it became something of an inter-regional contest to build a church as
high as possible.
Renaissance architecture
The Renaissance often refers to the Italian Renaissance that began in the 14th century, but recent
research has revealed the existence of similar movements around Europe before the 15th century;
consequently, the term “Early Modern” has gained popularity in describing this cultural
movement. This period of cultural rebirth is often credited with the restoration of scholarship in
the Classical Antiquities and the absorption of new scientific and philosophical knowledge that
fed the arts.
The development from Medieval architecture concerned the way geometry mediated between the
intangibility of light and the tangibility of the material as a way of relating divine creation to
mortal existence. This relationship was changed in some measure by the invention of Perspective
which brought a sense of infinity into the realm of human comprehension through the new
representations of the horizon, evidenced in the expanses of space opened up in Renaissance
painting, and helped shape new humanist thought.
Perspective represented a new understanding of space as a universal, a priori fact, understood
and controllable through human reason. Renaissance buildings therefore show a different sense
of conceptual clarity, where spaces were designed to be understood in their entirety from a
specific fixed viewpoint. The power of Perspective to universally represent reality was not
limited to describing experiences, but also allowed it to anticipate experience itself by projecting
the image back into reality.
The Renaissance spread to France in the late 15th century, when Charles VIII returned in 1496
with several Italian artists from his conquest of Naples. Renaissance chateaux were built in the
Loire Valley, the earliest example being the Château d’Amboise, and the style became dominant
under Francis I (1515–47). (See Châteaux of the Loire Valley). The Château de Chambord is a
combination of Gothic structure and Italianate ornament, a style which progressed under
architects such as Sebastiano Serlio, who was engaged after 1540 in work at the Château de
Fontainebleau.
Architects such as Philibert Delorme, Androuet du Cerceau, Giacomo Vignola, and Pierre
Lescot, were inspired by the new ideas. The southwest interior facade of the Cour Carree of the
Louvre in Paris was designed by Lescot and covered with exterior carvings by Jean Goujon.
Architecture continued to thrive in the reigns of Henry II and Henry III.
In England the first great exponent of Renaissance architecture was Inigo Jones (1573–1652),
who had studied architecture in Italy where the influence of Palladio was very strong. Jones
returned to England full of enthusiasm for the new movement and immediately began to design
such buildings as the Queen’s House at Greenwich in 1616 and the Banqueting House at
Whitehall three years later. These works with their clean lines and symmetry, were revolutionary
in a country still enamoured with mullion windows, crenellations and turrets.
European and colonial architecture
With the rise of various European colonial empires from the 16th century onward through the
early 20th century, the new stylistic trends of Europe were exported to or adopted by locations
around the world, often evolving into new regional variations.
Baroque architecture
The periods of Mannerism and the Baroque that followed the Renaissance signaled an increasing
anxiety over meaning and representation. Important developments in science and philosophy had
separated mathematical representations of reality from the rest of culture, fundamentally
changing the way humans related to their world through architecture. It would reach its most
extreme and embellished development under the decorative tastes of Rococo.
Return to Classicism
In the late 17th and 18th centuries, the works and theories of Andrea Palladio (from 16th-century
Venice) would again be interpreted and adopted in England, spread by the English translation of
his I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, and pattern books such as Vitruvius Brittanicus by Colen
Campbell. This Palladian architecture and continued classical imagery would in turn go on to
influence Thomas Jefferson and other early architects of the United States in their search for a
new national architecture.
By the mid-18th century, there tended to be more restrained decoration and usage of authentic
classical forms than in the Baroque, informed by increased visitation to classical ruins as part of
the Grand Tour, coupled with the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Federal-style architecture is the name for the classicizing architecture built in North America
between c. 1780 and 1830, and particularly from 1785 to 1815. This style shares its name with its
era, the Federal Period. The term is also used in association with furniture design in the United
States of the same time period. The style broadly corresponds to the middle-class classicism of
Biedermeier style in the German-speaking lands, Regency style in Britain and to the French
Empire style.
Revivalism and Orientalism
The 19th Century was dominated by a wide variety of stylistic revivals, variations, and
interpretations.
Beaux-Arts architecture
Beaux-Arts architecture denotes the academic classical architectural style that was taught at the
École des Beaux Arts in Paris. The style “Beaux-Arts” is above all the cumulative product of two
and a half centuries of instruction under the authority, first of the Académie royale
d’architecture, then, following the Revolution, of the Architecture section of the Académie des
Beaux-Arts. The organization under the Ancien Régime of the competition for the Grand Prix de
Rome in architecture, offering a chance to study in Rome, imprinted its codes and esthetic on the
course of instruction, which culminated during the Second Empire (1850–1870) and the Third
Republic that followed. The style of instruction that produced Beaux-Arts architecture continued
without a major renovation until 1968.
Art Nouveau
Around 1900 a number of architects around the world began developing new architectural
solutions to integrate traditional precedents with new social demands and technological
possibilities. The work of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde in Brussels, Antoni Gaudí in
Barcelona, Otto Wagner in Vienna and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, among many
others, can be seen as a common struggle between old and new.
Early Modern architecture
Early Modern architecture began with a number of building styles with similar characteristics,
primarily the simplification of form and the elimination of ornament, that first arose around
1900. By the 1940s these styles had largely consolidated and been identified as the International
Style.
The exact characteristics and origins of modern architecture are still open to interpretation and
debate. An important trigger appears to have been the maxim credited to Louis Sullivan: “form
follows function”. Functionalism, in architecture, is the principle that architects should design a
building based on the purpose of that building. This statement is less self-evident than it first
appears, and is a matter of confusion and controversy within the profession, particularly in regard
to modern architecture.
Expressionist architecture
Expressionist architecture was an architectural movement that developed in Northern Europe
during the first decades of the 20th century in parallel with the expressionist visual and
performing arts.
The style was characterised by an early-modernist adoption of novel materials, formal
innovation, and very unusual massing, sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms,
sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the mass production of brick, steel and
especially glass. Many expressionist architects fought in World War I and their experiences,
combined with the political turmoil and social upheaval that followed the German Revolution of
1919, resulted in a utopian outlook and a romantic socialist agenda. Economic conditions
severely limited the number of built commissions between 1914 and the mid-1920s, resulting in
many of the most important expressionist works remaining as projects on paper, such as Bruno
Taut’s Alpine Architecture and Hermann Finsterlin’s Formspiels. Ephemeral exhibition
buildings were numerous and highly significant during this period. Scenography for theatre and
films provided another outlet for the expressionist imagination, and provided supplemental
incomes for designers attempting to challenge conventions in a harsh economic climate.
Art Deco
The Art Deco style in architecture emerged in Paris just before World War I with the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées by Auguste Perret (1911-1913) and the Majorelle Building by Henri Sauvage
(1913). Its revolutionary use of reinforced concrete, geometric forms, straight lines, and
decorative sculpture applied to the outside of the building in plaques of marble, ceramics and
stucco, and later in stainless steel, were a departure from Art Nouveau. The style reached its peak
in the 1920s and 1930s, and took its name from the International Exhibition of Modern Industrial
and Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925. Art Deco became especially popular in the United States in
the late 1920s, where the style was used for skyscrapers including the Chrysler Building (1930)
and Empire State Building (1931), and for lavish motion picture palaces including Radio City
Music Hall (1932) in New York City and the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California. In the
1930s a stripped-down variation called Streamline Moderne emerged, which was inspired by the
curving aerodynamic forms of ocean liners, airplanes and trains. Art Deco was used for office
buildings, government buildings, train stations and movie theaters around the world in the 1930s,
but declined rapidly at the end of the decade due to the Great Depression and intense criticism of
the style by modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, who denounced what he felt was its
excessive ornament. By 1939, the style was largely out of fashion and was replaced by the more
austere International Style.
International Style
The International style was a major architectural trend of the 1920s and 1930s. The term usually
refers to the buildings and architects of the formative decades of modernism, before World War
II. The term had its origin from the name of a book by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip
Johnson which identified, categorised and expanded upon characteristics common to modernism
across the world. As a result, the focus was more on the stylistic aspects of modernism. The basic
design principles of the International Style thus constitute part of modernism.
The ideas of Modernism were developed especially in what was taught at the German Bauhaus
School in Weimar (from 1919), Dessau (between 1926–32) and finally Berlin between 1932–33,
under the leadership first of its founder Walter Gropius, then Hannes Meyer, and finally Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe. Modernist theory in architecture resided in the attempt to bypass the question
of what style a building should be built in, a concern that had overshadowed 19th-century
architecture, and the wish to reduce form to its most minimal expression of structure and
function. In the United States, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock treated this new
phenomenon in 1931 as if it represented a new style – the International Style, thereby
misrepresenting its primary mission as merely a matter of eliminating traditional ornament. The
core effort to pursue Modern architecture as an abstract, scientific programme was more
faithfully carried forward in Europe, but issues of style always overshadowed its stricter and
more puritan goals, not least in the work of Le Corbusier.
Contemporary architecture
Modern architecture
Modern architecture is generally characterized by simplification of form and creation of
ornament from the structure and theme of the building. It is a term applied to an overarching
movement, with its exact definition and scope varying widely. Modern architecture has
continued into the 21st century as a contemporary style, especially for corporate office buildings.
In a broader sense, modern architecture began at the turn of the 20th century with efforts to
reconcile the principles underlying architectural design with rapid technological advancement
and the modernization of society. It would take the form of numerous movements, schools of
design, and architectural styles, some in tension with one another, and often equally defying such
classification.
Critical regionalism
Critical regionalism is an approach to architecture that strives to counter the placelessness and
lack of meaning in Modern architecture by using contextual forces to give a sense of place and
meaning. The term critical regionalism was first used by Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre
and later more famously by Kenneth Frampton.
Frampton put forth his views in “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points of an architecture of
resistance.” He evokes Paul Ricœur’s question of “how to become modern and to return to
sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization”.
According to Frampton, critical regionalism should adopt modern architecture critically for its
universal progressive qualities but at the same time should value responses particular to the
context. Emphasis should be on topography, climate, light, tectonic form rather than scenography
and the tactile sense rather than the visual. Frampton draws from phenomenology to supplement
his arguments.
Postmodern architecture
Postmodern architecture is an international style whose first examples are generally cited as
being from the 1950s, and which continues to influence present-day architecture. Postmodernity
in architecture is generally thought to be heralded by the return of “wit, ornament and reference”
to architecture in response to the formalism of the International Style of modernism. As with
many cultural movements, some of postmodernism’s most pronounced and visible ideas can be
seen in architecture. The functional and formalized shapes and spaces of the modernist
movement are replaced by unapologetically diverse aesthetics: styles collide, form is adopted for
its own sake, and new ways of viewing familiar styles and space abound.
Classic examples of modern architecture are the Lever House and the Seagram Building in
commercial space, and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright or the Bauhaus movement in
private or communal spaces. Transitional examples of postmodern architecture are the Portland
Building in Portland and the Sony Building (New York City) (originally AT&T Building) in
New York City, which borrows elements and references from the past and reintroduces color and
symbolism to architecture. A prime example of inspiration for postmodern architecture lies along
the Las Vegas Strip, which was studied by Robert Venturi in his 1972 book Learning from Las
Vegas celebrating the strip’s ordinary and common architecture. Venturi opined that “Less is a
bore”, inverting Mies Van Der Rohe’s dictum that “Less is more”.
Following the postmodern movement, a renaissance of pre-modernist urban and architectural
ideals established itself, with New Urbanism and New Classical architecture being prominent
movements.
Deconstructivist architecture
Deconstructivism in architecture is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the
late 1980s. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, non-linear processes of design, an
interest in manipulating ideas of a structure’s surface or skin, and apparent non-Euclidean
geometry, (i.e., non-rectilinear shapes) which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements
of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings that
exhibit the many deconstructivist “styles” is characterised by a stimulating unpredictability and a
controlled chaos.
Important events in the history of the deconstructivist movement include the 1982 Parc de la
Villette architectural design competition (especially the entry from Jacques Derrida and Peter
Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi’s winning entry), the Museum of Modern Art’s 1988
Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in New York, organized by Philip Johnson and Mark
Wigley, and the 1989 opening of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, designed by Peter
Eisenman. The New York exhibition featured works by Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem
Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, and Bernard Tschumi. Since the
exhibition, many of the architects who were associated with Deconstructivism have distanced
themselves from the term. Nonetheless, the term has stuck and has now, in fact, come to embrace
a general trend within contemporary architecture.
Architecture in the 21st century
On January 21, 2013 architects began preparations for constructing the world’s first 3D-printed
building. An industrial-scale 3D printer used high strength artificial marble. Companies around
the world have 3D-printed numerous buildings, many only taking a few hours to be completed.
3D-printed buildings have been shown to be practical, cost effective, and environmentally
friendly. The technology is being expanded to other frameworks.
Sustainable architecture is an important topic in contemporary architecture, including the trends
of New Urbanism, New Classical architecture and Eco-cities.
