From the Greek Temple to the Beaux-Arts: The Classical Tradition and Its Rivals

The starting point. Greek temple building rested on the post and lintel system and was codified in the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders, with the Parthenon in Athens as its defining monument. Its earliest surviving works date to around 600 BC, and the language it set was the one later builders kept borrowing.

Rome took the Greek orders and joined them to the arch, the vault, the dome and concrete. That made interior spaces and engineering works Greece never attempted, such as the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the great baths, aqueducts and basilicas. Its own tradition runs from the Republic's founding in 509 BC to about the 4th century AD.

The eastern half of the Roman world carried building forward from the fourth century until the empire fell in 1453. Its signature is the dome carried on pendentives, which lets a circular dome rise over a square plan. The Hagia Sophia in Constantinople combines a longitudinal basilica plan with a centralized domed one.

Charlemagne's empire brought the Roman and Byzantine inheritance north of the Alps. The Palatine Chapel at Aachen, begun around 792 and consecrated in 805, took its inspiration from San Vitale in Ravenna and was designed by Odo of Metz. For more than two hundred years no building north of the Alps matched its span and height.

Born in the Ile-de-France in the mid twelfth century, Gothic is the great medieval alternative to the classical language. It combined the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress into a skeletal stone system, and walls freed of structural work dissolved into stained glass. Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres are among its defining works.

In the sixteenth century architects began to use Renaissance columns, pediments and proportions in deliberately strange ways. Michelangelo's vestibule of the Laurentian Library in Florence, with columns set into wall niches as if resting on brackets, is considered a pioneering work. The style is generally read as a transition from the High Renaissance to the Baroque.

Andrea Palladio, who lived from 1508 to 1580, drew on Greek and Roman architecture as transmitted by Vitruvius and set out his ideas in The Four Books of Architecture. His signature move was a temple front, a pedimented portico on columns, applied to the entrance of a country house. His approach was revived as Palladianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Between 1714 and 1830, under the four Hanoverian King Georges, classical building became the everyday idiom of Britain and its colonies. It shows in pilasters, pedimented doors and windows, and the uniform terraces of townhouses that still line whole squares in London, Bath, Edinburgh and Dublin.

The rival returns. The revival of medieval forms began as an antiquarian taste in mid-eighteenth-century England at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. Augustus Pugin championed it as a moral choice, and the Houses of Parliament, designed by Charles Barry with Pugin after the fire of 1834, are its most consequential built expression.

The trail ends with the academic classicism taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which blended French neoclassicism with Renaissance and Baroque ornament. It reached its fullest expression under the Second Empire and Third Republic and spread across Europe and the Americas. Grand Central Terminal in New York, completed in 1913, is a celebrated example.