Architectural Revivalism

Architectural revivalism is the use of design elements from an earlier architectural era that had fallen out of common use, and more narrowly names a Western architectural movement running from roughly the mid eighteenth century through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement is related to historicism and grew alongside the modern idea, first argued in eighteenth-century historical and philosophical writing, that a nation architecture expresses its national character, so architects of the period deliberately chose historical styles as models grounded in national tradition and values. Neoclassical architecture, reviving Classical Greek and Roman forms, and the Gothic Revival, reviving medieval Gothic forms, were its two most prominent strands, and Victorian-era Western building broadly exemplifies the movement. Revivalism took on added political weight after the French Revolution as European borders and national identities repeatedly changed, and it was itself succeeded by Modernism around the turn of the twentieth century.