Architectural style

For the US register of architectural styles, see National Register of Historic Places architectural style categories.
The Architect's Dream by Thomas Cole (1840) shows a vision of buildings in the historical styles of the Western tradition, including ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and Gothic.

An architectural style is a classification of buildings (and nonbuilding structures) based on a set of characteristics and features, including overall appearance, arrangement of the components, method of construction, building materials used, form, size, structural design, and regional character.[1]

Architectural styles are frequently associated with a historical epoch (Renaissance style), geographical location (Italian Villa style), or an earlier architectural style (Neo-Gothic style),[1] and are influenced by the corresponding broader artistic style and the "general human condition". Heinrich Wölfflin even declared an analogy between a building and a costume: an "architectural style reflects the attitude and the movement of people in the period concerned.[2]

The 21st century construction uses a multitude of styles that are sometimes lumped together as a "contemporary architecture" based on the common trait of extreme reliance on computer-aided architectural design (cf. Parametricism).[citation needed]

Folk architecture (also "vernacular architecture") is not a style, but an application of local customs to small-scale construction without clear identity of the builder.[3][4]

  1. ^ a b Harris 1998, p. 12.
  2. ^ Leach 2013, p. 35.
  3. ^ Alcock 2003.
  4. ^ J. Philip Gruen, "Vernacular Architecture", in Encyclopedia of Local History, 3d edition, ed. Amy H. Wilson (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017): 697-98.