Colonial Architecture

Colonial architecture is the hybrid architectural style that results when settlers combine the building traditions of their home country with the characteristics of the place they have settled, typically producing houses and buildings that feel familiar in form but are adapted to a new climate and to locally available materials. Because the pattern repeated across the colonial territories of several different imperial powers, including Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Russia and Italy, it produced a family of regionally distinct results rather than one single look, each balancing the conventions of the colonizing country against the practical demands of its new setting; the more specific American, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Italian colonial traditions on this atlas are individual instances of this broader pattern.