Building the American Scene: Nine Styles from the Federal Era to New Formalism

Neoclassical building style of the United States from about 1780 to 1830, drawing on the ornamental vocabulary of Robert Adam. Look for the semicircular or elliptical fanlight above the front door, and for Charles Bulfinch in Boston and Samuel McIntire in Salem as leading practitioners.

Born in England around 1802 with John Nash and his villa Cronkhill, the style reached the United States in the early 1840s and stayed popular for roughly forty years. Its American buildings are known by low pitched roofs, deep eaves on large brackets and often a square cupola.

Its American variant is named for Henry Hobson Richardson, who first used the style in the Richardson Olmsted Complex in Buffalo in 1870 and produced Trinity Church in Boston. Heavy stone massing and round headed arches set it apart from other Victorian revivals.

A residential style of the 1880s and after, tied to the New England resort towns and above all Newport, Rhode Island. One unbroken skin of wooden shingles wraps roof and walls together, and McKim, Mead and White are the firm most closely linked with it.

Popular in the United States roughly from 1880 to 1910, though it resembles the reign of the real Queen Anne very little. Asymmetrical facades, a steep front gable or tower and mixed surface textures mark it, and it developed in Britain before reaching America.

Emerging in the 1930s when industrial designers stripped Art Deco of ornament during the Great Depression. Long horizontal lines and curved corners suggest speed, so it turns up in bus and train stations, airport terminals and roadside cafes. The 1933 to 1934 Chicago World's Fair helped spread it.

Frank Lloyd Wright's answer to housing for the ordinary American middle class, with the Herbert Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, of 1937 generally regarded as the first. Single story L shaped plans, an open living space, a concrete slab with radiant heating and the carport are its marks.

Futurist commercial architecture that grew out of Streamline Moderne in Southern California and ran from about 1945 into the early 1970s. Built to catch a driver's eye at speed, motels, coffee shops and gas stations used boomerangs, sharp diagonals and starbursts. It is named for Googies Coffee Shop, designed by John Lautner.

Emerging in the United States in the mid 1950s, it returned to classical elements such as symmetry, columns and colonnades. Edward Durell Stone, Philip Johnson and Minoru Yamasaki, all earlier International Style architects, led it, and Stone is credited with its starting point at the United States Embassy in New Delhi.