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Architectural styles

  • Neoclassical architectureNeoclassical architecture rose out of a deliberate act of rejection. In the mid-18th century, architects across Italy, France, and Germany grew weary of the…
  • Baroque architectureBaroque architecture was born from a crisis of faith. When the Catholic Church faced the spread of Protestantism in the late 16th century, its response was…
  • Romanesque architectureRomanesque architecture reshaped every corner of medieval Europe before most people alive today could imagine a world without pointed spires.
  • Renaissance architectureRenaissance architecture was born in Florence in the early decades of the 1400s, and it did not creep into existence the way Gothic had slowly grown out of…
  • Gothic architectureGothic architecture took root in a single choir reconstruction at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, near Paris, completed between 1140 and 1144.
  • Indo-Islamic architectureThe year 1193 marked the establishment of Delhi as the capital of the Ghurid dynasty, initiating a profound architectural shift across the Indian…
  • Elizabethan architectureElizabethan architecture names a style of building that flourished during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England, from 1558 to 1603.
  • Constructivism (art)Constructivism began with a handful of artists in Russia who decided that beauty was not enough. Founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko…
  • Modernism"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." That line from W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" is how literary scholars often sum up Modernism, an early…
  • Byzantine architectureByzantine architecture spans more than eleven centuries, from the year 330, when Constantine the Great moved the Roman capital to Byzantium, to the fall of…
  • ManuelineManueline architecture first took shape in Portugal around 1490, and it spent the next three decades carving ropes, anchors, and seaweed into stone church…
  • MannerismMannerism is the art style born from a crisis of success. By the early years of the 16th century, painters and sculptors working in the Italian High…
  • Tudor architectureTudor architecture spans the years 1485 to 1603, a century and a quarter during which England's built environment shifted more dramatically than at almost…
  • Palladian architecturePalladian architecture began with a stonemason's son born in Padua in 1508. Andrea Palladio looked at the ruins of ancient Rome and saw not rubble but a set…
  • Church architectureChurch architecture is one of the longest continuous design traditions in human history, stretching across two thousand years of the Christian religion.
  • Empire styleThe Empire style took its name from an emperor. It originated under the rule of Napoleon I during the First French Empire, and it was built to flatter him.