Boom Style Architecture

Boom style, more often called Late Victorian architecture elsewhere, describes the architecture of Melbourne, Australia, from the land boom period of 1883 to 1891, when buildings were often distinguished by lavish ornament. A speculative property bubble, fed by generational wealth from the Victorian gold rush and the city's growing reputation as marvellous Melbourne, drove one of the largest speculative construction booms in the southern hemisphere, and confident owners commissioned architects to create exuberant designs in exotic styles signaling extreme wealth, in contrast to the more restrained Georgian and Renaissance Revival styles of earlier building periods. The term was later used derogatively once the boom collapsed in 1889 and left many buildings tied to bad debts and corruption, which helped justify their demolition over the following decades, and the term is occasionally applied, uncapitalized, to similarly opulent architecture of overlapping periods elsewhere in the late British Empire and to some extent in America.