I.

Introduction

Architecture, the art or science of designing and constructing buildings with durable materials following certain canons, so as to produce structures that are suited to their purpose, and that are visually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing. The English poet Sir Henry Wooton, quoting the Roman architect Vitruvius, stated that “Well building hath three conditions: Commoditie, Firmenes and Delight”.

Historically, architecture has followed a succession of recognizable styles that may, for example, be identified as Gothic, Baroque, or Neo-Classical; or it has a homogenous style associated with a particular culture, such as Greek, Roman, or Egyptian.

Architectural style, be it in a country house, factory, hotel, airport, or religious building, reflects the values as well as the needs of the society that produces it. However, it is governed not only by taste and aesthetic convention but also by a range of interrelated practical considerations; these are principally technology and available materials, an awareness of loads and stresses that certain parts of the building must bear, and the precept that the structure must fulfil the purpose for which it was built.

Vernacular architecture, not treated in this article, is distinct in that it follows no recognizable style, is usually the work of artisans with no formal training in architecture, and is usually made of materials available locally.

II.

Building Materials

The availability of suitable materials is intimately linked to the development of skills needed to exploit them and influenced the shapes of buildings. Carpentry developed in areas of the world that were thickly forested. Although it has become scarcer, timber remains an important building material.

In other areas, stone and marble were chosen for important monuments because they are fireproof and durable. Stone is also a sculptural material; stone architecture was often integral with stone sculpture. The use of stone has declined today because a number of other materials, such as glass, steel, and prestressed concrete are more economical to use and assemble.

In regions where both timber and stone were scarce, earth itself was used as a building material. Mud or clay was compacted into walls or made into bricks that were dried in the sun. Later, bricks were baked in kilns, which gave them greater durability.

Thus, early cultures used substances occurring in their environment and invented the tools, skills, and technologies to exploit a variety of materials. The legacy they created continues to inform more industrialized methods.

Building with stones or bricks is called masonry. The elements cohere through sheer gravity or the use of mortar, first composed of lime and sand. The Romans found a natural cement that, combined with inert substances, produced concrete. They usually faced this with materials that would give a better finish. In the early 19th century a truly waterproof cement, the key ingredient of modern concrete, was developed.

Another 19th-century development was the production of steel on an industrial scale; rolling mills turned out shapes that could form structural frames stronger than the traditional wooden frames. Moreover, steel rods could be positioned in wet concrete, which greatly improved the versatility of that material, giving impetus early in the 20th century to new forms facilitated by reinforced concrete construction. The subsequent availability of aluminium and its anodized coatings provided cladding (surfacing) material that was lightweight and virtually maintenance-free. Glass was known in prehistory and, in the form of stained glass windows, is celebrated for its contributions to Gothic architecture. Its quality and availability have been enormously enhanced by industrial processing, which has revolutionized the exploitation of natural light and the transparent properties of glass.

III.

Construction

When masonry materials are stacked vertically, as in a wall, they are very stable since every part is undergoing even compression. A more problematic aspect of construction, however, is presented by the need to span the space between walls so as to provide a building with a roof. The two basic solutions to spanning are post-and-lintel construction and arch and vault construction, and its offshoot the dome. In post-and-lintel construction, lintels, or beams, are laid horizontally across the tops of posts, or columns; additional horizontal elements span from beam to beam, forming decks that can support a roof or function as the floor of an upper storey. In arch, vault, and dome construction, the spanning element is curved rather than straight. In the flat plane of a wall, arches may be used in rows, supported by piers or columns to form an arcade; for roofs or ceilings, a sequence of arches, one behind the other, may be used to form a half-cylinder (or barrel) vault; to span large symmetrical spaces, an arch may be rotated from its peak to form a hemispherical dome.

Post-and-lintel construction can be executed in various materials, but gravity subjects the horizontal members to bending stress, in which parts of the member are under compression while others are under tensile stress. Wood, steel, and reinforced concrete are efficient as beams, whereas masonry, because it lacks tensile properties, requires much greater bulk and weight to be effective. Vaulting permits spanning without subjecting material to tension; it thus enables large areas to be roofed with masonry or concrete. The outward thrust of vaulting, however, must be counteracted by abutment, or buttressing.

Trussing, timbers forming a frame, is an important structural device used to achieve spans with less weighty materials. Spanning systems can be made of any appropriate material—most often wood, rolled steel, or tubing—and, by subdivision into triangles, can take almost any shape. Thus a frame composed of three end-connected members can be extended indefinitely by the principle of triangulation—attaching a horizontal tie beam to the bottom of two peaked rafters. Each separate part is then subject only to either compressive or tensile stress. In the 18th century, mathematicians learned to apply their science to the behaviour of structures, thus making it possible to determine the degree of stress in a given situation. This led to the development of space frames, which are simply trusses or other elements deployed three-dimensionally.

Advances in the science of analysing structural behaviour resulted from the demand in the 19th century for great civil engineering structures: dams, bridges, and tunnels. It is now possible to enclose space with suspension structures—the obverse of vaulting, in that materials are in tension—or pneumatic structures, the skins of which are held in place by air pressure. Sophisticated analysis is particularly necessary in the case of very tall structures, because stresses that could be exerted by the effect of wind or earthquakes then become a more important consideration than the effects of gravity.

Architecture must also take into account the internal functional equipment of modern buildings. In recent decades, elaborate escalator and lift systems, the control of temperature and humidity, air conditioning, artificial lighting, sanitation, fire precautions, and the distribution of electricity and other services have been developed. This has added to the cost of construction and has increased expectations of comfort and convenience.

Certain broad principles have always been discernible in the purposes for which buildings are constructed. The noblest works of architecture—temples, churches, mosques—celebrate the mysteries of religion and provide assembly places where gods can be propitiated or where the faithful can receive religious instruction and participate in symbolic rituals. Another important purpose has been to provide physical security: many of the world’s most permanent structures were built for reasons of defence.

Related to defence is the desire to create buildings that reflect civic pride or serve as status symbols. Palaces for kings and emperors unmistakably proclaimed their power and wealth. People of privilege have always been prominent patrons of designers, artists, and artisans, and their projects often represent the best work of a given period. Today large corporations, governments, and universities play the role of patron in a less personal way.

The proliferation of types of building today reflects the complexity of modern life. Modern Western architecture is overwhelmingly concerned with the creation of mass housing, large office buildings, shopping centres, and supermarkets, schools and universities, hospitals and clinics, and airports, hotels, and holiday resorts. Individual buildings are not seen in isolation, however. The attention of architects and their clients is increasingly focused on the interaction between new and existing buildings, and town planning takes into account the impact that new buildings have on particular urban neighbourhoods.

IV.

The Ancient World

The architecture of the ancient world, of the Orient, and of the pre-Columbian Americas may be divided into two groups: indigenous architecture, or ways of building that appear to have developed independently in distinct, local cultures; and Western-style architecture, which ultimately traces its roots back to the systems and building methods of Greece and Rome. The oldest examples of architecture solid enough to have survived, if only in the form of vestigial traces, date from the development of the first cities.

A.

Mesopotamia

This region, the greater part of modern Iraq, comprises the lower valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Assyrian city of Khorsabad, built of clay and brick in the reign of Sargon II (reigned 722-705 bc), was excavated as early as 1842, and much of its general plan is known. It became the basis for the study of Mesopotamian architecture, because the far older cities of Babylon and Ur were not discovered and excavated until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Early Persian architecture—influenced by the Greeks, with whom the Persians were at war in the 5th century bc—left the great royal compound of Persepolis (518-460 bc), created by Darius the Great, and several nearby rock-cut tombs, all north of Shīrāz in Iran.

B.

Egypt

The urban culture of Egypt also developed very early. Egypt’s greater political stability, however, ensured marked continuity in the establishment and conservation of tradition. Also, granite, sandstone, and limestone were available in abundance. These circumstances, in a cultural system conferring enormous power on rulers and priests, made possible the erection, over a long period, of the most impressive of the world’s ancient monuments.

Each Egyptian ruler was obsessed with constructing a tomb for himself more impressive and more permanent than that of his predecessors. Before the 4th Dynasty (begins c. 2680 bc) Egyptian royal burials were marked by a mastaba, a rectangular mass of masonry. This evolved into the stepped pyramid and finally into the fully developed, plane-sided pyramid, of which the largest and best preserved are those of Khufu (built c. 2570 bc) and Khafre (c. 2530 bc) at Giza, near Cairo. These immense monuments testify to the power that the pharaohs exerted over their subjects and also to the fascination of Egyptian architects with abstract, perfect geometric forms, a concern that reappears frequently throughout history.

The Egyptians built temples to dignify the ritual observances of those in power and to exclude others from those rites. Temples were therefore built within walled enclosures, their great columned halls (hypostyles) turning inwards, from a distance appearing only as a mass of sheer masonry. A linear sequence of hierarchical spaces led to successively more sanctified precincts. In this way was born the concept of the axis, which in the Egyptian temples was greatly extended by avenues of sphinxes in order to intensify the climactic experience of the approaching participants. In these temples, the monumental use of post-and-lintel construction in stone, in which massive columns, closely spaced, support deep lintels, is also introduced.

The best-known Egyptian temples are in the mid-Nile area in the vicinity of the old capital, Thebes. Here are found the great temples of Luxor, Karnak, and Dayr el-Bahri (15th-12th century bc) and Idfu (3rd century bc). See Egyptian Art and Architecture; Temple.

C.

India

Hindu building traditions are rich in visual symbols; the early stone architecture of India was elaborately carved, and as such are almost more like sculpture than architecture, especially as structural elements were not emphasized and buildings were rarely constructed to enclose large spaces.

The Indian commemorative monument takes the form of a large hemispherical mound called a stupa, like the one built from the 3rd century bc to the 1st century ad, during Buddhist ascendancy, at Sanchi, near Bhopal in central India.

In the early period of monastery and temple building, shrines were sculpted out of the solid rock of cliffs. The Ellora and Ajanta caves, north-east of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), are a series of great artificial caves carved out of the living rock over many centuries. As the art of temple building developed, carving into rock gave way to the more conventional method of building in stone to form a structure, always, however, with greater concern for sculptural mass than for enclosed space.

Hindu temples are found throughout India, especially in the south and east, which were less dominated by the Mughal rulers. Jainism, still a very successful cult, has its own temple tradition and continues to build on it. See Indian Art and Architecture.

D.

South East Asia

In South East Asia a Buddhist temple is called a wat. The most famous of these, and perhaps also the largest known, is Angkor Wat in central Cambodia, built in the early 12th century under the long-dominant Khmer dynasty. A richly sculptured stone complex, it rises 61 m (200 ft) and is approached by a ceremonial bridge 183 m (600 ft) long that spans the surrounding moat.

Buddhist architectural traditions, sometimes coming via China, are strongly evident in Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Java, and Sri Lanka. The rich temples and shrines of the Royal Palace compound in Bangkok are less than 200 years old, testifying to that culture’s continuing vitality.

E.

China

The stable and hierarchical life of the Chinese extended family, enshrined in China, has a traditional reverence for ancestors, is reflected in the formality of the Chinese house; it is built on a rectangular plan, preferably at the northern end of a walled courtyard entered from the south, with auxiliary elements disposed in a symmetrical fashion on either side of the north-south axis. This pattern was also the framework for more lavish complexes—mansions, monasteries, palaces, and, eventually, whole cities.

The city of Beijing developed over a very long time, under various rulers. Two contiguous rectangles, the Inner City and the newer Outer City, each cover several square kilometres. The Inner City contains the Imperial City, which in turn contains the Forbidden City, which sheltered the imperial court and the imperial family. The entire development adheres to symmetry along a prominent north-south avenue—the apotheosis, on a grand urban scale, of the Chinese house.

Stone, brick, tile, and timber are available in both China and Japan. The most characteristic architectural forms in both countries are based on timber framing. In China, the wooden post carried on its top an openwork timber structure, a kind of inverted pyramid formed of layers of horizontal beams connected and supported by brackets and short posts which in turn supported the rafters and beams of a steep and heavy tile roof. The eaves extended well beyond column lines on cantilevers. The resulting archetype is rectangular in plan, usually one storey high, with a prominent roof. See Chinese Art and Architecture.

F.

Japan

The Japanese house developed differently from the Chinese. The Japanese express a deep poetic response to nature, and their houses are more concerned with achieving a satisfying relationship with earth, water, rocks, and trees than with establishing a social order. This approach is epitomized in the Katsura Detached Palace (1st half of the 17th century), designed and built by a master of the tea ceremony. Its constructions ramble in a seemingly casual way, but in reality constitute a carefully considered sequence always integrated with vistas focusing on or originating from outdoor features.

Japan had already perfected timber prototypes early in its history. The Ise Shrine, on the coast south-west of Tokyo, dates from the 5th or 6th century; it is meticulously rebuilt every 20 years. Its principal building, within a rectangular compound containing auxiliary structures, is a timber treasure house elevated on wooden posts buried in the ground. It is crowned by a massive roof of thatch. Lacking both bracketing and trussing, the ridge is supported by a beam or ridgepole held up by fat posts at the middle of each gabled end; the forked rafters, joining atop the ridgepole, exert no outward thrust. This tiny but beautifully proportioned and crafted monument is an excellent example of the understated subtlety of the art of Japan. See Japanese Art and Architecture.

G.

Pre-Columbian Architecture

Whereas the nomadic tribes of North America left little permanent building, the Pueblo people of Sonora, Mexico, and of Arizona and New Mexico did build in stone and adobe. These Native American cultures were already in decline by ad 1300; a number of impressive cliff dwellings and other villages remain as significant monuments.

The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés encountered the Aztecs in 1519 and within two years had destroyed their capital city, Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now stands. But he passed over the nearby centre of the older Teotihuacán culture (100 bc-ad 700), which has now been extensively restored and excavated. Teotihuacán contains two immense pyramids—the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon—that recall those of Egypt. They are arranged, along with other monuments and plazas, on a north-south axis at least 3 km (2 mi) in length; the complex itself lies at the centre of what was a vast city, laid out geometrically in blocks. At Monte Albán, near Oaxaca, the centre of the Zapotec culture that flourished about the same time, imposing stone structures are set around a spacious plaza created by levelling the top of a mountain.

The Maya civilization had existed for 2,700 years when first confronted by the Spanish in the 16th century, but its greatest period of Maya building activity occurred between the 4th and the 11th centuries. The Maya occupied every part of the Yucatán Peninsula and south into Guatemala and Belize. The principal Maya sites, roughly in the order of their development, are Copán (Honduras); Tikal (Guatemala); and Palenque, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, and Tulum (Mexico). The important monuments found in these ceremonial centres are of stone; although the enclosure of space has more emphasis than in other pre-Columbian cultures, the Maya never mastered the true vault. Nevertheless, they created impressive structures through extensive earth moving and bold architectural sculpture either integral with the stone or as added stucco ornamentation. The so-called Governors’ Palace at Uxmal, sited on a great artificial terrace, is a long, horizontal building, the proportions and ornamentation of which suggest the eye and hand of a master designer.

The Incas’ extensive empire was centred high in the Andes of east-central Peru at Cuzco, which flourished from about 1200 to 1533, with other cities at nearby Sacsahuaman and Machu Picchu. Inca architecture lacks the sculptural genius of the Maya, but Inca stonework on a massive scale is unexcelled; enormous pieces of stone were transported over mountain terrain and fitted together with extreme precision, in what is called cyclopean masonry. See Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture.

H.

Classical Architecture

The building systems and forms of ancient Greece and Rome are called classical architecture. Greek contributions in architecture, as in so much else, defy summarization. The architecture of the Roman Empire has pervaded Western architecture for more than two millennia.

H.1.

Aegean Architecture

The architecture that developed on mainland Greece (Helladic) and in the basin of the Aegean Sea (Minoan) belongs to the Greek cultures that preceded the arrival in about 1000 bc of the Ionians and the Dorians. The Minoan culture (3000-1200 bc) flourished on the island of Crete; its principal site is the multichambered Palace of Minos at Knossos, near present-day Iráklion. On the Peloponnese Peninsula near Argos are the fortress-palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns, and in Asia Minor the city of Troy—all of them excavated by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in the last quarter of the 19th century. Mycenae and Tiryns are believed to represent the Achaean culture, the subject of Homer’s epic Iliad and Odyssey. See Aegean Civilization.

H.2.

Greek Architecture

Unlike the Egyptian arrangement, in which columns are arranged within a walled structure, the Greek temple consisted of a sanctuary surrounded by columns, which articulated exterior space. Perhaps for the first time, the overriding concern was for the external appearance of a building that also contained a sacred inner space. Greek architecture does not oppress the viewer with overmonumentality and is seldom arranged hierarchically along an axis, but sited so as to display spatial relationships from several viewpoints. Greek temples, of one basically uniform design, range in size from the tiny Temple of Nike Apteros (427-424 bc) of about 6 by 9 m (20 by 30 ft) on the Acropolis in Athens to the gigantic Temple of Zeus (c. 500 bc) at Agrigento in Sicily, which covered more than 1 hectare (2 acres).

Over many centuries the Greeks modified their earlier models. Concern for the profile of the building in space spurred designers towards perfection in the articulation of parts, and these parts, known today as the orders of architecture, became intellectualized as stylobate, base, shaft, capital, architrave, frieze, cornice, and pediment, each metaphorically representing its structural purpose.

Two orders developed more or less concurrently. The Doric order predominated on the mainland and in the western colonies. The acknowledged Doric masterpiece is the Parthenon (448-432 bc) crowning the Acropolis in Athens.

The Ionic order originated in the cities on the islands and coasts of Asia Minor, which were more exposed to Asian and Egyptian influences; it featured capitals with spiral volutes, a more slender shaft with quite different fluting, and an elaborate and curvilinear base. Few early examples survive, but Ionic was used inside the Propylaea (begun 437 bc) and in the Erechtheum (begun 421 bc), both part of the Acropolis.

The Corinthian order, a later development, consists of Ionic capitals elaborated with acanthus leaves. It has the advantage of having four identical faces and is therefore more suitable for use at corners than was the Ionic order.

The end (466 bc) of the Persian Wars and the challenge of new cities established (from 333 bc) by Alexander the Great stimulated Greek town planning, resulting in the rebuilding of Dorian cities. The plan of Miletus in Asia Minor is an early example of the gridiron block, and it provides a prototype for the disposition of the central public areas, with the significant municipal buildings related to the major civic open spaces. A typical Greek agora (public square or meeting place) included a temple, a council chamber (bouleuterion), a theatre, and gymnasiums, all enclosed within a colonnade. In Greek domestic architecture, the Mycenaean megaron (central hall) became a house with rooms leading off a small open court, or atrium, an arrangement later elaborated in Italy, Spain, and North Africa. See Greek Art and Architecture; House.

H.3.

Roman Architecture

Roman architecture continued the development of Classical architecture, but with quite different results. Unlike the tenuously allied Greek city-states, Rome became a powerful, well-organized empire that, architecturally no less than culturally and politically, left its mark throughout the Mediterranean world, north-west as far as Britain, and south-east into Asia Minor. The Romans undertook great engineering works—roads, canals, bridges, and aqueducts. Their masonry was more varied; they used bricks and concrete freely, as well as stone, marble, and mosaic.

Use of the arch and vault introduced curved forms; curved walls produced a semicircular space, or apse, for terminating an axis. Cylindrical and spherical spaces became elements of design, well suited to the grandiose rooms appropriate to the imperial scale of Roman architecture.

Being semicircular in section, barrel or tunnel vaults are inherently limited in span, and they exert lateral thrust. Two Roman inventions of enormous importance overcame this. First was the dome, effectively a vault over a circular plan and more stable than the barrel vault, but also limited because of the outward thrust inherent to the structure. It was possible for Hadrian to rebuild (ad 118-128) the Pantheon in Rome with a dome rising 43 m (142 ft) above ground level, but only by encircling it with a massive hollow ring wall 6 m (20 ft) thick that encloses eight segments of curved units. Thus, a dome covers a one-room building but cannot easily be combined with other domes to cover a larger space.

The second important invention was the groin vault, formed by the intersection of two identical barrel vaults over a square plan. They intersect along ellipses running diagonally to the corners of the square. Because the curvature is in more than one direction, each barrel tends to reinforce the other. The great advantage of the groin vault is that it can be placed on four piers (built to receive 45° thrust), leaving the sides of the square for windows or for continuity with adjoining spaces.

In the great Roman thermae (baths) and basilicas (law courts and markets), rows of square groin-vaulted bays (or units) provided vast rooms lighted by clerestory windows high on the long sides under the vaults.

The Romans introduced the commemorative or triumphal arch and the colosseum or stadium. They further developed the Greek theatre and the Greek house; many excellent examples of houses were unearthed in the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, towns that were buried in the violent eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79.

The Roman genius for grandiose urban design is seen in the plan of Rome, where each emperor left a new forum, complete with basilica, temple, and other features. The forum was laid out along an axis but with greater complexity than heretofore seen. The most remarkable among the great complexes is Hadrian’s Villa (ad 125-32) near Tivoli, which abounds in richly inventive plan forms.

The Greek orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) were widely adopted and further elaborated. But the Romans ultimately trivialized them by applying them indiscriminately, usually in the form of engaged columns, or pilasters, with accompanying cornices, to both interior and exterior walls as a form of ornamentation. They lost in the process the orders’ capacity to evoke a sense of the loads being sustained in post-and-lintel construction.

V.

The Medieval World

Two major historical events had far-reaching implications for the history of architecture. One was the recognition of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 312. The other was the establishment of the Islamic faith by the Prophet Muhammad in about 610. From the one developed Christian architecture; from the other grew Islamic architecture.

A.

The Architecture of Christianity

When, in 330, Constantine removed the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium, which then became Constantinople (now İstanbul), the Christian Church was divided into East and West. This set in motion two divergent architectural developments—Early Christian and Byzantine—each taking as its point of departure a different Roman prototype.

A.1.

Early Christian Architecture

Churches built on a basilican plan and having a sloping roof rather than vaulting (which was not readopted until about the year 1000) form part of the Early Christian architectural tradition. The surviving churches in Rome that most clearly evoke the character of Early Christian architecture are San Clemente (with its 4th-century choir furnishings), Sant’ Agnese Fuori le Mura (rebuilt 630 and later), and Santa Sabina (422-432). While Byzantine architecture developed on the concept called the central church, assembled around a central dome like the Pantheon, the Western or Roman Church—more concerned with congregational participation in the Mass—preferred the Roman basilica. Early models resembled large barns, with stone walls and timber roofs. The central part (nave) of this rectangular structure was supported on columns opening towards single or double flanking aisles of lower height. The difference in roof height permitted high windows, called clerestory windows, in the nave walls; at the end of the nave, opposite the entrance, was placed the altar, backed by a large apse (also borrowed from Rome), in which the officiating clergy were seated.

The Eastern emperor Justinian I was in control of Ravenna during his reign (527-565). Some of the constructions there can be considered Byzantine, as they featured mosaic mural compositions in Byzantine style. Two of Ravenna’s great churches, however—Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo (c. 520) and Sant’ Apollinare in Classe (c. 530-549)—are basilican in plan.

A.2.

Byzantine Architecture

Early prototypes of Byzantine architecture are San Vitale (526-547) in Ravenna and in St Sergius and St Bacchus (527) in Constantinople, both domed churches on an octagonal plan with surrounding aisles. But it was Justinian’s great church at Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, or the Church of the Holy Wisdom (532-537), that demonstrated how a vast dome could be superimposed on a square plan. The solution was to articulate the transition between the square plan of the building and the circular plan of the dome by means of pendentives, or concave triangles, the arrangement of which can be visualized by drawing a circle within a square. Raised vertically, the four concave triangles form a ring on which rests the dome.

At Hagia Sophia, arches on two opposing sides of the central square open into semi-domes, each pierced by three smaller radial semi-domes, forming an oblong volume 31 m (100 ft) wide by 80 m (260 ft) long. The central dome rises out of this series of smaller spherical surfaces. An abundance of small windows, including a circle of them at the rim of the dome, admits diffused light.

Byzantine figurative art developed a characteristic style; its architectural application took the form of mosaics, great mural compositions executed in coloured marble and gilt glass cut into tiny pieces (tesserae), a technique presumed to have been borrowed from Persia.

Byzantine churches, each with a central dome opening into surrounding semi-domes and other vault forms, and accompanied by characteristic Byzantine iconography, proliferated throughout the Byzantine Empire—Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and parts of North Africa and Italy—and also influenced the design of churches in Western Christendom. Later churches are often miniaturizations of the original grandiose concept; their proportions emphasize vertical space, and the domes themselves become smaller. In the cathedral of St Basil the Blessed (1500-1560) in Moscow, and in other Russian Orthodox churches, the Byzantine dome eventually evolved into the onion-shaped dome, effectively a finial that was no longer relevant to interior space making.

A.3.

Romanesque Architecture

A plan drawn on parchment of a now-vanished monastery in St Gall, Switzerland, shows that by the time of Charlemagne (742-814) the Benedictine monastic order had become a large departmentalized institution, but not until almost 1000 did church building begin in earnest throughout the West. At first, the architects were all monks, for the monasteries supplied not only the material wealth but also the pool of learning that made the new initiative possible.

The basilican plan used in earlier times was modified in accordance with the Christian liturgy, in which a member of the clergy led prayer and addressed the faithful, and performed religious rites at an altar. The Christian symbol of the cross was imposed on the rectangular plan of the church by the addition of a transept (perhaps borrowed from Byzantium). This created a spatial distinction between the nave (for the congregation) and the chancel, the space beyond the transept, where the choir (for the monks) and, beyond it, the main altar, were located. The main altar, the focal point of the building, stood in the apse, the semicircular or polygonal recess at the end of the church, girded by the ambulatory, a semicircular extension of the aisles flanking the nave. Subaltars, needed for the celebrations of mass that many monks were required to attend daily, were placed in the transept and in the ambulatory. At the nave entrance was the narthex, an antechamber or vestibule that acted as a reception area for pilgrims. Although many French churches such as—St Savin sur Gartempe (nave 1095-1115), St Sernin in Toulouse (c. 1080-1120), and in Sainte Foy in Conques (begun 1050)—had barrel-vaulted naves, St Philibert in Tournus (950-1120) had transverse arches to support a series of barrel vaults, with windows high in the vertical plane at the ends of the vaults. Ultimately, the groin vault became the preferred solution, because it made possible the use of high windows and created a continuous longitudinal crown, as in Sainte Madeleine (1104) in Vézelay, France, and Worms Cathedral (11th century), in Germany. The semicircular arches of the groin vault form a square in plan; thus, the nave consisted of a long series of square bays or segments. The smaller and lower vaults of the aisles were often doubled up, two to each nave bay, to conform to this configuration.

The greatest monastic Romanesque church, Cluny III (1088-1121), did not survive the French Revolution but has been reconstructed in drawings; it was an immense double-aisled church almost 137 m (450 ft) long, with 15 small chapels in transepts and ambulatory. Its design influenced Romanesque and Gothic churches in Burgundy and beyond. Another important stimulus to French Romanesque architecture was the pilgrimage cult; a convergence of routes led over the western Pyrenees into Spain and thus to Santiago de Compostela, where the pilgrim could venerate what were held to be the relics of St James. Along the routes to Spain, certain points were sanctified as pilgrimage stops, which led to the erection of splendid Romanesque churches at Autun (1120-1132), Paray-le-Monial (c. 1100), Périgueux (1120), Conques (1050), Moissac (c. 1120), Clermont-Ferrand (1262), St Guilhem le Désert (1076), and others.

A.4.

Gothic Architecture

At the beginning of the 12th century, the Romanesque idiom was gradually replaced by Gothic style. Although the change was a response to a growing rationalism in Christian theology, it was also the result of technical developments in vaulting. The process of building a vault requires first a temporary carpentry structure, called centring, which supports the masonry until the shell has been completed and the mortar has set. Centring for the ordinary groin vault must be for an entire structural unit, or bay, with a resultant heavy structure resting on the floor. About 1100, the builders of Durham Cathedral in England invented a new method. They built two intersecting diagonal arches across the bay, on lighter centring perhaps supported high on the nave walls, and then found ways to fill out the shell resting on secondary centring. This gave a new geometric articulation—the ribbed vault. Ribs did not modify the structural characteristics of the groin vault, but they offered constructional advantage and emphatically changed the vault’s appearance.

Another development was the pointed arch and vault. The main advantage was geometrical. Vaults of various proportions could cover a rectangular or even a trapezoidal bay, so that nave bays could correspond with the narrower aisle bays, and vaulting could proceed around the curved apse without interruption. Also, the nave walls containing clerestory windows could be raised as high as the crown of the vault. Soon this clerestory became an entire window, filled with tracery and stained glass that conferred a new luminosity on the interior.

With these advances, the master builders were encouraged to construct more elegant, higher, and apparently lighter structures. But the vaults had to be kept from spreading outwards by restraint imposed near their base, now high above the aisle roofs. The solution was another innovation, the flying buttress, a half arch leaning against the vault from the outside, with its base firmly set in a massive pier of its own.

This new style was most fully developed in the Île-de-France. The abbey church of St Denis (1140-1144), the royal mausoleum near Paris, became the first grandiose model. As they competed for the skills of architects and artisans, the bishops of prosperous northern cities then sought to outdo one another in the splendour and prestige of their cathedrals. The major French examples, with their beginning dates, are Lâon, 1160; Paris, 1163; Chartres, 1194; Bourges, 1195; Reims, 1210; Amiens, 1220; and Beauvais, 1225. English Gothic cathedrals, with the dates on which work began, are Canterbury, 1174; Lincoln, 1192; Salisbury, 1220; York Minster, 1261; and Exeter, 1280. The transverse span of the nave vaults of these cathedrals was in the range of 9 to 15 m (30 to 50 ft), but the choir of Beauvais cathedral, which had collapsed in 1284 attained a height of 47 m (154 ft) when it was rebuilt.

Although the finest medieval architecture was ecclesiastical, great secular buildings were also constructed in the years 1000 to 1400. One of the most impressive and best-preserved examples is the Krak des Chevaliers (1131) in Syria, a fortress built by the Knights Hospitaler at the time of the Crusades.

Military architecture was a defensive response to advances in the technology of warfare; the ability to withstand siege remained important. Fortifications sometimes embraced whole towns; important examples include Ávila in Spain, Aigues-Mortes and Carcassonne in France, Chester in England, and Visby in Sweden.

Urbanization increased on a large scale, brought about by the needs and desires of many groups, including the Church and its monasteries, royalty and nobility, the craft guilds, and merchants and bankers. The planning patterns that developed are quite different from the geometry of Roman cities or of Renaissance theorists. Throughout northern Europe, where hardwood was abundantly available until the Industrial Revolution, timber-frame construction flourished. In half-timber construction, a quickly erected wooden frame was infilled with wattle and daub (twigs and plaster) or brickwork. Monastic barns and municipal covered markets necessitated large braced wooden frames. The descendants of Vikings built the curiously beautiful stave churches in Norwegian valleys. In the Alps whole towns were built of horizontally interlocked timbers of square section. Brick architecture also flourished in many regions, notably Lombardy, northern Germany, Holland, and Denmark.

B.

The Architecture of Islam

The mosque, the most prominent and distinctive aspect of Muslim architecture, was designed to function as a place of ritual ablution and prayer. The desert climates in which Islam first became established also required that the mosque give protection from sun, wind, and sand. The initial prototype was a simple walled-in rectangle containing a fountain and surrounded with porticoes. At the centre of the kiblah, the wall facing the direction of Mecca, was the mihrab, a niche. The minbar, a pulpit, stood near by. Structural elements were the arch and the dome; roofs were either flat or vaulted, and windows were small. The mosque had at least one tower, or minaret, from which the call to prayer was issued five times daily. The same basic plan is followed to this day.

B.1.

Western and Middle Eastern Islamic Architecture

A classic example of the early mosque in the western Islamic world is the well-preserved Great Mosque at Al Qayrawān in Tunisia, which was built between 836 and 866.

The oldest mosque in Iraq is at Samarra (847-852). It is now a brick ruin, but its curious cone-shaped minaret with outside spiral ramp survives. The Great Mosque at Córdoba in Spain covers 2.4 hectares (6 acres) and was built in several stages from 786 to 965. It was converted to a Christian cathedral in 1236. Also in Spain is the Alhambra (1354-1391) at Granada, one of the most dazzling examples of Islamic palace architecture; its courts and fountains have delighted visitors ever since its construction.

Over the centuries Islamic architecture borrowed extensively from other cultures. Beginning in 1453, the Ottoman Turks ruled from Constantinople. Sultan Suleiman I (the Magnificent) was a patron of the arts and of architecture. His architect, Sinan, was familiar with Byzantine traditions, and in his mosques he refined and elaborated on the great 6th-century prototype, Hagia Sophia. Sinan’s masterpieces are the Suleimaniye Mosque (begun 1550) in İstanbul and the Selimiye mosque (begun 1569) in Edirne.

Iran is renowned for brick masonry vaulting and for glazed ceramic veneers. The finest examples of Islamic architecture in Iran are found in Eşfahān, the former capital. The enormous imperial mosque, the Masjid-i-Jami, represents several construction periods, beginning in the 15th century. Even more richly ornamented is the sumptuous Masjid-i-Shah (1585-1616), built as part of the royal civic compound of Shah Abbas I.

B.2.

Islamic Architecture in India

The Mughal peoples, who had embraced Islam, made incursions into India and established an empire there. Mughal architecture was based on Persian traditions, but developed in north-western India in ways peculiar to that region. India’s earliest surviving mosque, the Qutb, near Delhi, was begun in 1195. It is impossible to separate Mughal religious architecture from that erected to glorify the Mughal Empire.

The Mughal emperors were great builders. Their most impressive monuments are a succession of imperial tombs. Notable are the superbly architectonic tomb (1564-1573) of Humayun in Delhi, the jewel-like Itimad-ud-Daulah (1622-1628) in Agra, and the beautifully proportioned and decorated Taj Mahal (1632-1648), also in Agra. A typical tomb consisted of a high central dome surrounded by smaller chambers arranged about two intersecting axes so that all four sides of the structure are alike. It is built on a raised platform overlooking a large formal garden, surrounded by a wall, with pavilions at the axial points.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the Mughal emperors built lavish and elaborate forts of which Lahore Fort, the Red Fort in Delhi, and Fatehpur Sikri in Agra are the most remarkable. These forts included living quarters, mosque, baths, public and private audience halls, and a harem. See Indian Art and Architecture.

The Islamic faith forbade the representation of people and animals; yet craftsmen created highly ornamented buildings by using geometric designs, floral arabesques, and Arabic calligraphy. The materials are glazed tile, wood joinery and marquetry, marble, mosaic, sandstone, stucco carving, and white marble inlaid with dark marbles and gemstones. See Islamic Art and Architecture.

VI.

The New Age

In Western Europe, the cultural revolution that was the Renaissance brought in an entirely new age, not only in philosophy and literature but in the visual arts as well. In architecture, the principles and styles developed in ancient Greece and Rome were revived and reinterpreted, to remain dominant until the 20th century.

A.

Renaissance Architecture

The Renaissance, literally meaning “rebirth”, brought into being some of the most significant and admired works ever built. Beginning in Italy about 1400, it spread to the rest of Europe during the next 150 years.

A.1.

Italian Renaissance Architecture

The families who governed rival cities in northern Italy in the 15th century—de Medici, Sforza, da Montefeltro, and others—had become wealthy enough through commerce to become patrons of the arts. People of leisure began to take a serious and scholarly interest in the neglected Latin culture—its literature, its art, and its architecture, whose ruins lay about them.

Early in the 15th century, work on Florence cathedral was still in progress. Piers had already been erected to support a dome almost as large as that of the Pantheon in Rome. A proposal for its completion was submitted by Filippo Brunelleschi, who had studied Roman structural solutions. The dome that he designed and built (1420-1436), and which crowns the cathedral today, is derived from Rome but differs in being octagonal, having an inner and an outer shell connected by ribs, being pointed and rising higher, and being crowned with a lantern. Its drum, pierced by circular windows, stands without buttressing, for the base contains a tension ring—huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps and topped with heavy iron chains. Two additional tension rings are contained within the dome’s double shells. Brunelleschi stood at the threshold between Gothic and Renaissance. His Pazzi Chapel (begun c. 1441), also in Florence, is a clear statement of new principles of proportion and design.

A new type of urban building evolved at this time—the palazzo, or city residence of a prominent family. Palazzi were several storeys high; rooms were grouped around a cortile, or courtyard.

The Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his design for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446-1451), incorporated three superimposed classical orders into the façade, much as in the Roman Colosseum, except that he used pilasters instead of engaged columns. They seem to have been engraved in the wall plane; the resulting compartmentalization of the façade provides a logical setting for the windows. In 1485 Alberti also published the first book on architectural theory since Vitruvius, which became a major influence in promoting Classicism.

In the 16th century, Rome became the leading centre for the new architecture. The Milanese architect Donato Bramante practised in Rome beginning in 1499. His Tempietto (1502), an elegantly proportioned circular temple in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, was one of the earliest Renaissance structures in Rome.

The erection of a new basilica of St Peter in Vatican City was the most important of many 16th-century projects. In drawing the first plan (1503-1506) Bramante rejected the Western basilica concept in favour of a Greek cross of equal arms with a central dome. Popes who succeeded Julius II, however, appointed other architects—notably Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno—and, when the church was completed in 1612, the Latin cross form had been imposed with a lengthened nave. Michelangelo’s dome, ribbed and with a lantern, is a logical development from Brunelleschi’s in Florence. It rises in a high oval and is the prototype not only for the domes of later churches but for those of many state capitol buildings in the United States.

Towards the middle of the 16th century such leading architects as Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, and Giacomo da Vignola began to use the classical Roman elements in ways that did not conform to the rules that governed designs in the early Renaissance. Arches, columns, and entablatures came to be used as devices to create dramatic effects through the manipulation of depth and recession, asymmetry, and unexpected proportions and scales. This tendency, which coalesced in the style Mannerism, is exemplified by the sophisticated Palazzo del Te (1526-1534) at Mantua.

The architect Andrea Palladio worked in and around Vicenza and Venice. Although he visited Rome, he did not wholly adopt the Mannerist approach. In the villas he built for gentleman farmers, he explored many variations on classical norms: governing axis defined in the approach, single major entrance, single major interior space surrounded by smaller rooms, secondary functions extended in symmetrical arms, and careful attention to proportion. They were immortalized by Palladio’s publication The Four Books of Architecture (1570; trans. 1738), in which drawings for them appear, with the dimensions written into the plans to emphasize Palladio’s harmonic series of dimensions that govern the major proportions. These books later enabled Inigo Jones in England and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to propagate Palladian principles among the gentleman farmers of their times. In two large Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and II Redentore (1577), Palladio made important contributions to the adaptation of classic ideas to the liturgical and formal traditions of Roman Catholicism.

A.2.

Northern Renaissance Architecture

By the end of the 15th century, Renaissance ideas had spread to France. While royal patronage attracted Italian artists (beginning with Leonardo da Vinci in 1506), native talent was also encouraged and developed. It is believed that the Italian architect Domenico da Cortona designed the extraordinary Château de Chambord that Francis I built (1519-1547) in the Loire Valley, which has the outward characteristics of a medieval castle. The French architects Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder and Philibert Delorme worked at Fontainebleau, and Delorme was architect of the Château d’Anet, where Benvenuto Cellini was employed as sculptor. In Paris, work on the Louvre (a residence of the kings of France) was undertaken by Pierre Lescot in 1546.

Philip II of Spain engaged Juan de Herrera and Juan Bautista de Toledo as architects for his colossal Escorial (1563-1584) near Madrid—half palace, half monastery. England was somewhat slower to change. Inigo Jones, the principal architect of the early English Renaissance, visited Italy and emulated Palladio in such works as the Banqueting House (1619-1622) in Whitehall, London. See Renaissance Art and Architecture.

B.

Baroque and Rococo Architecture

In early Renaissance and even Mannerist architecture, elements were combined in rather static compositions; inherent to classic design is a serene balance between elements, and spaces locked into the geometry of perspective. By contrast, the Baroque style of the 17th century deployed classic elements in more complex ways, so that the identity of these elements was masked, and space became more ambiguous and more articulated. Baroque movement is understood as that of the observer experiencing the work, and of the observer’s eyes scanning an interior space or probing a long vista. Some of the later Rococo works contain a richness of ornament, colour, and imagery that, combined with a highly sophisticated handling of light, overwhelms the observer.

B.1.

Italian Baroque Architecture

The roots of Baroque art and architecture lay in Italy; the best known exponent of the style is sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, designer of the great oval plaza (begun 1656) in front of St Peter’s basilica in Rome. Francesco Borromini produced two masterpieces, both on an intimate scale, also in Rome. In San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1641; façade completed 1667) he distorted the dome, on pendentives, into a coffered ellipse to stretch the space on a longitudinal axis; the entire façade appears to undulate. The plan of Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (begun 1642) is based on two intersecting equilateral triangles that produce six niches of alternating shapes; these shapes, defined by pilasters and ribs, rise through what would ordinarily be a dome, continuing the hexagonal concept from floor to lantern.

Guarino Guarini designed the church of San Lorenzo (1668-1687), in Turin with eight intersecting ribs that offer interstices for letting in daylight. His even more astonishing Cappella della Santa Sindone (Chapel of the Holy Shroud, 1667-1694), also in Turin, has a cone-shaped hexagonal dome created by six segmental arches rising in eight staggered tiers.

B.2.

French Baroque Architecture

Churches in Baroque style were also built in France in the 17th century. One of the greatest examples is the church of St Louis at Les Invalides (1676-1706), in Paris, by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The best French talent, however, was absorbed in the secular service of Louis XIV and his government. The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (1657-1661) is a grandiose ensemble representing the collaboration of the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Lebrun, and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. The Sun King was so impressed that he engaged these designers to rebuild the Palace of Versailles on a truly regal scale. The Palace of Versailles became the centre of government and was continuously enlarged between 1667 and 1710. Bernini submitted designs for enlarging the Louvre in Paris, but Claude Perrault was finally awarded that commission (executed 1667-1679). French architecture of the 17th century (le grand siècle) lacks the exuberance of Italian Baroque, but French architects working in the style achieved the epitome of elegance.

B.3.

English Baroque Architecture

In England the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666 brought to prominence the many-talented Sir Christopher Wren, whose masterpiece is St Paul’s Cathedral (1675-1710). He also designed or influenced the design of many other English churches. Among other innovations, Wren introduced the single square tower belfry with tall spire that became the hallmark of church architecture in England and the United States.

B.4.

Baroque Urban Design

Baroque thinking powerfully addressed the area of urban design. Michelangelo’s Campidoglio (Capitol, 1538-1564) in Rome had already provided a model for the public square, and villas such as Vignola’s Villa Farnese (begun 1539) in Caprarola showed how these important buildings could extend axial ties into the townscape. Baroque church façades were frequently designed in relation to the piazzas on to which they looked rather than the church interiors that they fronted. Often, whole new towns were built on formal principles. Early in the 18th century, at the behest of Peter the Great, Italian and French Baroque architects came to Russia to build St Petersburg. In the New World were built such large urban centres as Mexico City; Santiago, in Chile; Antigua, in Guatemala; and Philadelphia; Savannah, in Georgia; and Washington, D.C.

B.5.

Rococo Architecture

The death of Louis XIV in 1715 coincided with changes in the artistic climate which led to the exuberant Rococo style. Once again the work of Italians—notably Guarini and Filippo Juvarra—provided the basis for a new thrust. The expression of royal grandeur has survived in Paris’s Place de la Concorde (begun 1753) by Ange-Jacques Gabriel and the great axis and plazas (1751-1759) by Héré de Corny at Nancy. A more intimate and personal expression appears in Gabriel’s Petit Trianon (1762-1764) at Versailles. Rococo came to full flower, however, in Bavaria and Austria. The Austrian Benedictine Abbey (1748-1754) at Ottobeuren by Johann Michael Fischer is only one of a brilliant series of spectacular churches, monasteries, and palaces that includes Balthasar Neumann’s opulent Vierzehnheiligen (Church of the Fourteen SS, 1743-1772) near Bamberg, Germany, and the Amalienburg Pavilion (1734-1739) by the Flemish-born Bavarian architect François de Cuvilliés in the park at Nymphenburg, near Munich.

The many elaborate colonial churches found throughout Central and South America attest to the power and influence of the Roman Catholic Church during Baroque and Rococo times. They include cathedrals in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and Oaxaca, in Mexico; Antigua, in Guatemala; Quito, in Ecuador; Ouro Preto, in Brazil; and Cuzco, in Peru; as well as such northern missions as Sant’ Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona, and the chain of missions on the Californian coast. The Spanish architect José Churriguera developed an extremely elaborate decorative style that, transferred to Latin America and somewhat debased, was given the name Churrigueresque. See Latin American Art and Architecture.

B.6.

Neo-Classical Architecture

In many countries of northern Europe the elegance and dignity attainable through adherence to classical rules of composition retained appeal, while in central and southern Europe and Scandinavia, Baroque and Rococo ran their course. In England, Blenheim Palace, designed (1705) by Sir John Vanbrugh for the Duke of Marlborough, emulated in rougher and reduced form the grandeur of Versailles.

A renewed interest in Palladio and in his follower Inigo Jones emerged. Development of the spa town of Bath gave opportunities to John Wood and his son to apply Palladian classicism to the design of Queen’s Square (1728), the Circus (1754-1770), and finally the great Royal Crescent (1767-1775), in all of which the individual houses were made to conform to an encompassing classic order. Robert Adam popularized classicism, expressing it notably through delicate stucco ornamentation. Historical scholarship became more precise, and true Greek architecture—including such pure examples of Doric architecture as the Parthenon—became known to architects through The Antiquities of Athens, published by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett in 1762. These developments reinforced the influence of Neo-Classicism in England, and the resulting architectural idiom became popularly known as the Georgian style.

In what was to become the north-eastern United States, Peter Harrison and Samuel McIntire took their cues from English architects in their own version of Georgian style, which, after the United States won independence was referred to as Federal style. In the South-east, where the aristocracy was predominantly rural, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and others derived their building style more directly from Palladio. Jefferson, whose early virtuosity had been demonstrated in Monticello (1770-1784), was also moved by ancient Rome, and placed a version (1817-1826) of the Pantheon at the head of his magnificent Lawn at the University of Virginia. See Neo-Classical Art and Architecture.

VII.

The Industrial Age

The Industrial Revolution, which began in England about 1760, led to radical changes at every level of civilization throughout the world. The growth of heavy industry brought a flood of new building materials—such as cast iron, steel, and glass—with which architects and engineers devised structures hitherto undreamed of either in function, size, and form.

A.

Eclectic Revivals

In the late 18th century, the Baroque, the Rococo, and neo-Palladianism fell from favour. Patrons and designers turned instead to genuine Greek and Roman prototypes. Selective borrowing from another time and place became fashionable. The preoccupation with ancient Greece was particularly strong in the young United States from the early years of the 19th century until about 1850. New settlements were given Greek names—Syracuse, Ithaca, Troy—and Doric and Ionic columns, entablatures, and pediments, mostly transmuted into white-painted wood, were applied to public buildings and important town houses in the style called Greek Revival.

In France, the imperial cult of Napoleon steered architecture in a more Roman direction, as seen in the church of La Madeleine (1807-1842), a huge Roman temple in Paris. French architectural thought had been jolted at the turn of the century by the highly imaginative published projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicholas Ledoux. These men were inspired by the massive aspects of Egyptian and Roman work, but their monumental (and often impractical) compositions were innovative, and they are admired today as visionary architects.

The most original architect in England at the time was Sir John Soane; the museum he built (1812-1813) as his own London house still excites astonishment for its inventive romantic virtuosity. Late English Neo-Classicism came to be seen as élitist; thus, for the new Houses of Parliament the authorities insisted on Gothic or Tudor Revival. The appointed architect, Sir Charles Barry called into consultation A. W. N. Pugin, champion of the Gothic Revival. Pugin took responsibility for the details of this vast monument (begun 1836). In a short and contentious career, he made a moral issue out of a return to the Gothic style. Other architects, however, felt free to select whatever elements from past cultures best fitted their projects—Gothic for Protestant churches, Baroque for Roman Catholic churches, early Greek for banks, Palladian for institutions, early Renaissance for libraries, and Egyptian for cemeteries.

In the second half of the 19th century developments brought about by the Industrial Revolution became overwhelming. Many were shocked by the sprawling and unsightly urban districts that resulted from the proliferation of factories and workers’ housing and by the deterioration of taste among the newly rich. For all that architects were employed on the construction of canals, tunnels, bridges, and railway stations—the new modes of transport at the time—they contributed only a veneer of culture.

The Crystal Palace (1850-1851; reconstructed 1852-1854) in London, a vast but ephemeral exhibition hall, was the work of Sir Joseph Paxton, a man who had learned how to put iron and glass together in the design of large greenhouses. It demonstrated a hitherto undreamed-of kind of spatial beauty, and in its carefully planned building process, which included prefabricated standard parts, it foreshadowed industrialized building and the widespread use of cast iron and steel.

Also important in its innovative use of metal was the great tower (1887-1889) of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel in Paris. In general, however, the most gifted architects of the time sought escape from their increasingly industrialized environment by further development of traditional themes and eclectic styles. Two contrasting but equally brilliantly conceived examples are Charles Garnier’s sumptuous Paris Opéra (1861-1875) and Henry Hobson Richardson’s grandiose Trinity Church (1872-1877) in Boston.

B.

Modern Architecture

At the turn of the century, designers sought to break away completely from borrowed styles. Antoni Gaudí, who worked in Barcelona, Spain, was the most original; his sinuous Casa Milá (1905-1907) and the unfinished Iglesia di Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family, 1883-1926) exhibit a search for new organic structural forms. His work has some affinity with Art Nouveau, a style that had developed contemporaneously in Brussels and Paris. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose masterpiece is the Glasgow School of Art (1898-1899), espoused a more austere version of Art Nouveau.

B.1.

The Skyscraper

In the Wainwright Building (1890-1891) in St Louis, Missouri, the Guaranty Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York, and the Carson Pirie Scott Department Store (1899-1904) in Chicago, the architect Louis Sullivan gave new expressive form to urban commercial buildings. His career converges with the so-called Chicago School of architects, whose challenge was to invent the skyscraper or high-rise building, facilitated by the introduction of the electric lift and the sudden abundance of steel. They made a successful transition from the masonry bearing wall to the steel frame, which assumed all the load-bearing functions. The structure’s skeleton could be erected quickly and the remaining components hung on it to complete the building, an immense advantage for high-rise buildings on busy city streets. Sullivan is memorable not only for his own work but for having provided the apprenticeship of Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. See American Art and Architecture.

B.2.

Reinforced Concrete

In France attention centred on reinforced concrete. Auguste Perret’s apartment building (1902-1903) in the Rue Franklin and his Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1911-1912), both in Paris, were early successes. Tony Garnier had, during his studies in Rome, created a detailed design for an imaginary city with many buildings, all in concrete; plans of the city were published in 1917 as La cité industrielle. In Vienna Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos worked in severe linear forms and proclaimed that “ornament is a crime”. Peter Behrens, a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Craft Alliance), is revered as a German precursor of modern architecture.

B.3.

The Bauhaus

When the Bauhaus opened, the modern movement in architecture began to coalesce. The Bauhaus school (Weimar, 1919-1925; Dessau, 1926-1933) brought together architects, painters, and designers from several countries, whose common desire was to formulate goals for the visual arts in the modern age. Its first director was Walter Gropius, who designed the innovative buildings for the move to Dessau; its second was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The new architecture demonstrated its virtues in new Siedlungen (low-cost housing) in Berlin and Frankfurt. An exhibition of housing types, the Weissenhof Siedlung (1927) in Stuttgart, brought together works by Mies, Gropius, J. J. P. Oud, and Le Corbusier; this milestone identified the movement with a better life for the common man. The chastely elegant German Pavilion (1929) by Mies for the Barcelona Exhibition, executed in such lavish materials as travertine, marble, onyx, and chrome-plated steel, asserted a strong, formal argument independent of any social goals. Gropius, his disciple Marcel Breuer, and Mies eventually established themselves in the United States, where they enjoyed productive and influential decades—extending through the 1970s for Breuer—as architects and teachers.

Le Corbusier, over a long career, exerted immense influence. His early publications championed a machine aesthetic and urged the abandonment of traditional cities in favour of life and work in skyscrapers arranged regimentally in vast parks. His Villa Savoie (1929-1930) in the French countryside plays down a sense of structure and materials in order to dramatize the complexity of spacial organization and allow a subtle ambiguity between interior and exterior space. In the 1950s, with Jawaharlal Nehru as client, he laid out the new capital city of the Punjab, Chandīgarh, and designed for it three monumental concrete government edifices standing in a vast plaza. In France he produced two unique religious buildings, the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp (1950-1955) and the Dominican monastery of La Tourette (1957-1961), both built in concrete. Having abandoned the extreme rationalism of his early career, in these extraordinary structures he manipulated form and light for emotional response and dramatic effect.

B.4.

Innovative Architecture

Such structural engineers as Robert Maillart, Eugène Freyssinet, and Pier Luigi Nervi produced works in reinforced concrete that combined imagination with rationality to achieve aesthetic impact. Among architects Jørn Utzon, in Australia’s Sydney Opera House (1957-1973), and Eero Saarinen, in Dulles Airport (1960-1962) near Washington, D.C., employed unusual structural solutions. Based in Helsinki, Alvar Aalto extended his oeuvre through more than four decades, refusing to celebrate the industrialized repetition of steel, concrete, glass, and aluminium, but moulding space with utmost sophistication, great care in the distribution of light, and the use of materials—stone, wood, and copper—with familiar and sympathetic tactile qualities. In the United States Louis I. Kahn infused his designs with a transcendent monumentality recalling Roman classicism, as in his Kimbell Art Museum (1972), located in Fort Worth, Texas, where tunnel vaults are transformed into light-modulating girders.

B.5.

The International Style

Despite these noteworthy exceptions—including such later works of Wright as New York’s Guggenheim Museum (completed 1959)—the style initiated by the Bauhaus architects and termed the International Style gradually prevailed after the 1930s. The theory and practice of the new style was introduced in the United States largely through the efforts of Philip Johnson, one of Gropius’s students at Harvard University. In the hands of its most gifted exponents, such as Mies, the International Style was particularly well suited to large metropolitan apartment and office towers. The chaste elegance and subtle proportions of Mies’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1951) in Chicago and (with Philip Johnson) his Seagram Building (1958) in New York represent Modernism at its finest. Many of his imitators, however, seized on its commercial potential; it proved extremely efficient for large-scale construction, in which the same module could be repeated indefinitely. Inner spaces became standardized, predictable, and profitable, and exteriors reflected the monotony of the interiors; the blank glass box became ubiquitous.

Assessing Modernism after the half century in which it was dominant, commentators pointed out that even though it was embraced by big business and big government, the general public never grew fond of it. At most an austere classicism was conceded to it, but this was achieved in a coldly impersonal and often overwhelming way. By about 1930, Modernism had severed architecture’s links with the past. Suddenly it became incorrect for a new building to make any reference to previous styles; and for a period of time the study of historical styles almost disappeared from professional schools.

B.6.

Postmodern Architecture

Between about 1965 and 1980 architects and critics began to espouse tendencies resulting in a style that is loosely called postmodern. Although Postmodernism is not a cohesive movement based on a distinct set of principles, as was modernism, in general it can be said that the Postmodernists value individuality, intimacy, complexity, and occasionally even humour.

Postmodern tendencies were given early expression in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966; revised ed. 1977) by the American architect Robert Venturi. In this provocative work he defended vernacular architecture—for example, filling stations and fast-food restaurants—and attacked the modernist establishment with such satirical comments as “Less is a bore” (a play on Mies’s well-known dictum “Less is more”). By the early 1980s, Postmodernism had become the dominant trend in American architecture and an important phenomenon in Europe as well. Its success in the United States owed much to the influence of Philip Johnson, who had performed the same service for Modernism 50 years earlier. His AT&T Building (1984) in New York, with its Renaissance allusions and its pediment evoking Chippendale furniture, immediately became a landmark of Postmodern design.

Other Postmodern office towers built during the 1980s aspired to a similar high stylistic profile, recalling the great Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s or striving for an eccentric flamboyance of their own. Vivid colour and other decorative elements were effectively used by Michael Graves in several notable buildings, while Richard Meier developed a more austere version of Postmodernism, influenced by Le Corbusier, in his designs for museums and private houses. Outstanding American practitioners of Postmodernism, in addition to Venturi, Johnson, Graves, and Meier, are Helmut Jahn, Charles Gwathmey, Charles Willard Moore, and Robert A. M. Stern.

Closely related to the Postmodernist interest in historical styles was the historic preservation movement, which during the 1970s and 1980s led to the renovation of many older landmark buildings and to a tendency to resist new architecture that seemed to threaten the scale or stylistic integrity of existing structures. The stark, confrontational approach of modernism has been replaced by a more inclusive sense of the architectural heritage that acknowledges and seeks to preserve the very finest achievements of every period.

See also African Art and Architecture; Canadian Art and Architecture; Interior Design; Oceanian Art and Architecture; Seven Wonders of the World.