Europe's Margins: Eleven Styles from the Sami Tent to the Georgian Dome

Goahti is a Sami dwelling built three ways, covered in fabric, peat and moss, or timber. Its four curved poles form a distinctive four-legged stand, and unlike the related lavvu, whose poles meet at the top, a goahti keeps them separate. The disassembled frame was traditionally carried by domesticated reindeer.

A stave church is a medieval wooden church named for its post and lintel framing, with load-bearing pine posts called stav in Norwegian. Only twenty nine remain standing in Norway, most built between 1150 and 1350, and beyond Scandinavia only two genuine medieval examples survive, Hedared in Sweden and Vang, moved in 1842 to Karpacz in Poland.

The National Romantic style drew on early medieval and prehistoric Nordic precedents to express a regional identity, reacting against industrialization. Its landmarks include Copenhagen City Hall of 1905, Helsinki Central Station of 1919 and Stockholm City Hall of 1923, with Saarinen, Gesellius and Lindgren among its leading firms.

Dutch Baroque is a restrained Baroque of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, often called Dutch Palladianism and read as an expression of the republic's democratic values. Jacob van Campen and Pieter Post established it, and buildings such as the Mauritshuis and Huis ten Bosch show giant order pilasters, pediments and symmetrical, large-windowed blocks without Baroque ostentation.

The Basque baserri farmstead began wholly in timber, and from the fifteenth century its ground floor was framed in stone with timber kept for the upper floors. Roofs were steeper in Pyrenean valleys to shed snow, and in the late nineteenth century a neo-Basque style blended the farmhouse with European influences, as at the Villa Arnaga in Cambo-les-Bains.

Sicilian Baroque flowered after the earthquake of 1693 set off a rebuilding of eastern Sicily. By about 1730 local architects had a confident style of grinning stone masks and putti, curving facades, wrought iron balconies and decorated rustication often carved from lava stone. It lasted barely fifty years before neoclassicism displaced it from the 1780s.

The Zakopane style was founded by Stanislaw Witkiewicz, who rejected foreign influence in favor of Goral highland building traditions. He set its look with the Villa Koliba, designed between 1892 and 1894. Its wooden buildings carry hand-carved decoration and blend folk methods with Polish manor architecture and Art Nouveau motifs, and it dominated the region until about 1914.

Brancovenesc style, also called the Wallachian Renaissance, grew under Prince Constantin Brancoveanu, voivode of Wallachia from 1688 to 1714 and a wealthy builder of palaces and churches. Though it touched painting and sculpture, it centered on architecture and became one of the most distinctive regional building styles of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Balkans.

Architecture in Kievan Rus centered on Kiev and Novgorod and is the earliest period of both Russian and Ukrainian architecture, building on Byzantine foundations. Most of what survives is Orthodox churches or fragments of city gates and fortifications. After the Mongol invasions of the early thirteenth century, the tradition continued in Novgorod, Vladimir-Suzdal and Galicia-Volhynia.

Traditional Russian church architecture descended from Byzantine models passed on through Kievan Rus. Its best-known feature is the onion dome, whose steep sides are often explained as a response to heavy snow, alongside the tented roof, or shatyor, used in wooden village churches and later in masonry. Saint Basil's Cathedral, completed in 1561, combines them.

Georgian architecture is marked by monumentality, strict proportions and moderate decoration. Its signature contribution is the cross-dome style, which emerged in the ninth century and sets a conical dome on a high drum over a rectangular or cross-shaped lower structure. Its influence reached Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria, Iviron on Mount Athos and the Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem.