Neoclassical architecture

Neoclassical architecture began in the mid-18th century as a revival of ancient Greek and Roman design and flourished into the mid-19th. It pushed back against the ornamental excess of the Late Baroque and Rococo, and archaeology supplied the fuel: the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum, begun in the late 1740s, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s history of ancient art in 1764, and Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens, whose first volume in 1762 gave architects accurate surveys of Greek buildings for the first time.

You recognize the style by its symmetry: a centered entrance with equal rows of windows on either side, columns or pilasters as the main facade decoration, and a triangular pediment over the entrance. Walls are smooth plaster in white, pale gray, or pale yellow, ornament stays sparse and flat, and the lower floor sometimes carries rustication. Greek Revival, the style’s last phase, goes furthest with baseless fluted Doric columns and full temple fronts.

The canon is monumental and public. Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Panthéon in Paris (1758-1790) carries a triple-shell dome on the model of Rome’s Pantheon; Carl Gotthard Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (1788-1791) was modeled on the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis; Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum (1825-1830) faces Berlin’s Lustgarten with eighteen Ionic columns.

From the 1860s the single classical norm dissolved into the century’s eclectic revivals. Classical building never quite ended, though: New Classical architecture has carried the tradition on since the 1950s and 60s, and the Driehaus Prize has honored it since 2003.