Victorian Architecture

Victorian architecture is not a single style but a series of architectural revival styles current in Britain, the United States and elsewhere during the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. Rather than one coherent aesthetic, it names an era in which architects drew eclectically on historic precedent, producing distinct sub styles including Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne, each of which had its own period of dominance within the era, for example Italianate gaining influence from the 1840s and 1850s while Gothic Revival grew more prevalent by the 1880s. What unifies these otherwise different revival styles under the single Victorian label is a shared emphasis on ornamentation and decorative detail, which rejected the plainer, more restrained classicism of the preceding Georgian period. Because the term covers such a wide range of sub styles across two continents and more than six decades, describing a building as simply Victorian identifies its era rather than any one specific set of forms.