architecture

Art of designing structures. The term covers the design of the visual appearance of structures; their internal arrangements of space; selection of external and internal building materials; design or selection of natural and artificial lighting systems, as well as mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems; and design or selection of decorations and furnishings. Architectural style may emerge from evolution of techniques and styles particular to a culture in a given time period with or without identifiable individuals as architects, or may be attributed to specific individuals or groups of architects working together on a project.

Early architecture
Little remains of the earliest forms of architecture, but archaeologists have examined remains of prehistoric sites and documented villages of wooden-post buildings with above-ground construction of organic materials (mud or wattle and daub) from the Upper Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. More extensive remains of stone-built structures have given clues to later Neolithic farming communities as well as to the habitations, storehouses, and religious and civic structures of early civilizations. The best documented are those of ancient Egypt, where exhaustive work in the 19th and 20th centuries revealed much about both ordinary buildings and monumental structures, such as the pyramid tombs near modern Cairo and the temple and tomb complexes concentrated at Luxor and Thebes.

Classical
The basic forms of classical architecture evolved in Greece between the 16th and 2nd centuries BC. A hallmark was the post-and-lintel construction of temples and public structures, classified into the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders and defined by simple, scrolled, or acanthus-leaf capitals for support columns. The Romans copied and expanded on Greek classical forms, notably introducing bricks and concrete and developing the vault, arch, and dome for public buildings and aqueducts.

Byzantine
This form of architecture developed primarily in the Eastern Roman Empire from the 4th century, with its centre at Byzantium (later named Constantinople, now Istanbul). It is dominated by the arch and dome, with the classical orders reduced in importance. Its most notable features are churches, some very large, based on the Greek cross plan (Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; St Mark's, Venice), with formalized painted and mosaic decoration.

Islamic
This developed from the 8th century, when the Islamic religion spread from its centre in the Middle East west to Spain and east to China and parts of the Philippine Islands. Notable features are the development of the tower with dome and the pointed arch. Islamic architecture, chiefly through Spanish examples such as the Great Mosque at Córdoba and the Alhambra in Granada, profoundly influenced Christian church architecture, for example, the adoption of the pointed arch in Gothic architecture.

Romanesque
This style flourished in Western European Christianity from the 10th to the 12th centuries. It is marked by churches with massive walls for structural integrity, rounded arches, small windows, and resulting dark volumes of interior space. In England the style is generally referred to as Norman architecture (an example is Durham Cathedral). Romanesque enjoyed a renewal of interest in Europe and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gothic
This form emerged out of Romanesque. The development of the pointed arch and flying buttress made it possible to change from thick supporting walls to lighter curtain walls with extensive expansion of window areas (and stained-glass artwork) and resulting increases in interior light. Gothic architecture was developed mainly in France from the 12th to 16th centuries. The style is divided into Early Gothic (for example, Sens Cathedral), High Gothic (Chartres Cathedral), and Late or Flamboyant Gothic. In England the corresponding divisions are Early English (Salisbury Cathedral), Decorated (Wells Cathedral), and Perpendicular (Kings College Chapel, Cambridge). Gothic was also developed extensively in Germany and Italy.

Renaissance
The 15th and 16th centuries in Europe saw the rebirth of classical form and motifs in the Italian neoclassical movement. A major source of inspiration for the great Renaissance architects – Andrea Palladio, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Donato Bramante, and Michelangelo Buonarotti – was the work of the 1st-century BC Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. The Palladian style was later used extensively in England by Inigo Jones; Christopher Wren also worked in the classical idiom. Classicism, or neoclassicism as it is also known, has been popular in the USA from the 18th century, as evidenced in much of the civic and commercial architecture since the time of the early republic (the US Capitol and Supreme Court buildings in Washington; many state capitols).

Baroque
European architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries elaborated on classical models with exuberant and extravagant decoration. In large-scale public buildings, the style is best seen in the innovative works of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini in Italy and later in those of John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and Christopher Wren in England. There were numerous practitioners in France and the German-speaking countries, and notably in Vienna.

Rococo
This architecture extends the baroque style with an even greater extravagance of design motifs, using a new lightness of detail and naturalistic elements, such as shells, flowers, and trees.

Neoclassical
European architecture of the 18th and 19th centuries again focused on the more severe classical idiom (inspired by archaeological finds), producing, for example, the large-scale rebuilding of London by Robert Adam and John Nash and later of Paris by Georges Haussman.