Classical Roots and Their Returns

Start in central Italy, where the Etruscans built from roughly 900 BC until Rome absorbed their territory by 27 BC. Around 600 BC, after contact with the Greeks, they began raising monumental temples with stone foundations and a columned front porch, but with walls of wood or mud brick.

The Greek temple is the source of the language the rest of the path keeps returning to. It rests on the post and lintel system and is codified in the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders, with the Parthenon in Athens as its defining monument.

Rome took the Greek orders and joined them to the arch, the vault, the dome and concrete. That combination made the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the great baths and the basilicas possible, and it set the structural vocabulary Europe drew on for the next fifteen centuries.

The Eastern Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, carried Roman building forward from the fourth century until 1453. Its signature move was the dome carried on pendentives, which lets a circular dome rise over a square plan, as in the Hagia Sophia.

In the mid twelfth century the Ile-de-France produced a different answer to the same structural problem. The pointed arch, rib vault and flying buttress carried loads on points rather than walls, so the walls could dissolve into stained glass, as at Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres.

Classicism returns in Britain and its colonies between 1714 and 1830, named for the four Hanoverian kings called George. Its pilasters, pedimented doors and windows, and uniform terraces of townhouses still line whole squares in London, Bath, Edinburgh and Dublin.

The medieval past answers back. Beginning as an antiquarian taste at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill in mid eighteenth century England, Gothic Revival grew into a moral cause under Augustus Pugin and produced the Houses of Parliament after the fire of 1834.

Victorian is a label for an era from 1837 to 1901, not one style. Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne all sit under it, united by an emphasis on ornament that rejected the plainer classicism of the Georgian period.

The path ends with classicism taught as a system at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Its academic blend of French neoclassicism with Renaissance and Baroque ornament peaked under the Second Empire and the Third Republic, and shaped American public buildings from 1880 to 1920, including Grand Central Terminal, completed in 1913.