New Classical Architecture

New Classical architecture is a contemporary movement that revives traditional classical and historic vernacular building methods and forms, emerging in the late twentieth century partly as a deliberate reaction against the abstraction of modernism and against Postmodernism's more ironic, quotation based use of classical motifs. Rather than treating classical columns, pediments and proportion as decorative references applied to a modern structure, New Classical architects generally aim to build in a genuinely traditional manner, often using historic materials and construction techniques and adhering closely to established classical orders and rules of proportion. The movement gained institutional recognition with the establishment in 2003 of the Richard H Driehaus Architecture Prize, administered by the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture, which specifically honors contemporary architects working in the classical and traditional idiom, distinguishing the award from the modernist orientated Pritzker Architecture Prize. Architects associated with the movement include Robert A M Stern in the United States and Quinlan Terry in Britain, and New Classical architecture shares much of its underlying philosophy, though not always its specific stylistic vocabulary, with the New Urbanism movement's broader preference for traditional urban forms over modernist planning.