Architectural styles

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Medieval architecture covers a whole era, roughly 1000-1500: Romanesque and Gothic are its named styles, and the period also owns castles, town walls and old town street plans.

12 places · 2 cities

Romanesque architecture is built on the round arch. It shaped Europe through the 11th and 12th centuries, in churches with thick walls, small windows, and heavy piers carrying stone vaults.

96 places · 16 cities

Gothic architecture reaches for height and light with pointed arches, rib vaults, and walls of stained glass. Born in 1140s France, it shaped Europe's churches into the 1500s.

475 places · 49 cities

Renaissance architecture revived the symmetry, orders, and domes of antiquity. It began in 15th-century Florence and reached Sweden through the Vasa kings' castles.

328 places · 31 cities

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Baroque architecture is theatrical, symmetrical, and richly ornamented, built to inspire awe. Born in Rome in the late 1500s, it shaped Europe into the 1750s.

702 places · 57 cities

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Gothic Revival brought pointed arches, towers, and tracery back in the 19th century. In Sweden it shaped hundreds of churches and the era's contested cathedral restorations.

155 places · 24 cities

Neoclassical architecture revived the columns, symmetry, and smooth pale facades of ancient Greece and Rome. In Sweden it arrived as the Gustavian and Karl Johan styles.

783 places · 75 cities

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Historicism is 19th century architecture that draws its forms from earlier periods, recreating historic styles rather than inventing one. It is the family the individual revivals belong to.

12 places · 3 cities

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Victorian is a period rather than a single style: the eclectic revivals built across Britain and its colonies during Victoria's reign, 1837-1901, as construction turned to iron frames.

222 places · 24 cities

Neo-renaissance dressed the 19th century's museums, banks and apartment streets in the forms of Renaissance palaces. Born around 1840, it reached the main streets of thousands of towns.

171 places · 24 cities

12 places · 2 cities

Beaux-Arts is monumental classical architecture out of the teaching at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris: symmetrical, heavily sculpted, and the standard dress for civic buildings around 1900.

175 places · 22 cities

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Neo-Baroque took the forms of the Baroque back up in the late 19th century, for opera houses, parliaments and theatres. France called the same style Second Empire, Germany called it Wilhelminism.

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Art Nouveau drew its forms from nature: whiplash curves, plant ornament, asymmetry. It flourished from the 1890s to 1914; Germany and the Nordic countries know it as Jugendstil.

150 places · 18 cities

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National Romanticism built heavy and dark in brick and rough granite, drawing on medieval and vernacular Nordic models. The style shaped Nordic architecture from the 1890s to about 1920.

67 places · 8 cities

Nordic Classicism gave the Nordic countries smooth plastered facades, calm symmetry and sparse classical ornament 1910-1930. In Britain its Swedish strand was named Swedish Grace.

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Art Deco is the geometric, heavily ornamented style of the 1920s and 1930s: zigzags, chevrons and sunbursts worked in terracotta, chrome and glass. It takes its name from a Paris exposition held in 1925.

138 places · 18 cities

Functionalism let a building's purpose decide its form: smooth light facades, flat roofs, large bare windows. In Sweden, where it broke through in 1930, everyone calls it funkis.

127 places · 10 cities

Modernism strips away ornament and lets function shape the building in glass, steel, and concrete. It broke through in the 1920s and dominated construction after World War II.

577 places · 62 cities

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Brutalism leaves concrete raw and structure exposed. It defined civic architecture from the 1950s into the 1970s, and the word itself was coined in Sweden.

79 places · 10 cities

Late modernism is modernism's final act, roughly 1960-1990: the movement's ideas taken to extremes in large-scale offices, exposed technology and building systems.

51 places · 7 cities

Postmodernism answered modernist orthodoxy with color, wit, and borrowed history. It rose in the 1970s, peaked in the 1980s, and faded by the mid-1990s.

37 places · 6 cities

High-tech architecture puts the structure and the pipes on the outside and makes them the design. It grew out of British modernism and shaped commercial and cultural building through the 1970s and 1980s.

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Contemporary architecture is a period label for building since 2000 rather than one style. Climate demands, mass timber, and digital design tools drive its parallel currents.

1,210 places · 98 cities

Vernacular architecture is building without architects: houses shaped by local materials, local climate, and craft handed down through generations.

211 places · 27 cities