From the Greek Temple to the Fractured Form: Twelve Styles in Order

The starting point. Greek temple building rests on the post and lintel system and the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders, with its earliest surviving works dating to around 600 BC. Britannica notes that the temple was basically a house for the deity, represented by a cult statue. Its language of proportion is the one Rome and the Renaissance later copied.

Rome took the Greek orders and joined them to the arch, the vault, the dome and concrete. That made the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the great baths and the aqueducts possible. The page dates the tradition from the founding of the Republic in 509 BC to about the 4th century AD, after which building is reclassified as Late Antique or Byzantine.

The Roman inheritance moves east. Dated from AD 330, when Constantine made Constantinople the capital, to the fall of the empire in 1453, Byzantine building is known for domes carried on pendentives, which let a round dome rise over a square plan. Hagia Sophia combines a longitudinal basilica plan with a centralized domed one.

Born in the Ile-de-France in the mid twelfth century, Gothic joined the pointed arch, the rib vault and the flying buttress into a skeletal stone system that carried loads on points rather than walls. The freed walls became stained glass. Notre-Dame de Paris and Chartres are among its defining works.

Andrea Palladio, who lived from 1508 to 1580, drew on Greek and Roman principles of symmetry and proportion as transmitted by Vitruvius, and published them in The Four Books of Architecture. His signature move was a temple front portico on a domestic villa. The style was revived as Palladianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and reached Britain and the American colonies.

A reaction to heavier Baroque forms such as Versailles. Rococo emerged in France in the 1730s and had passed out of fashion there by 1785, replaced by Neoclassical seriousness. It favors pastel colors, ivory and gold, mirrors, and asymmetrical curving decoration in stucco, and is expressed mostly in interiors rather than exterior massing.

The medieval past returns as a deliberate choice. The revival began as an antiquarian taste at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill in mid-eighteenth-century England, and Augustus Pugin championed it as a moral choice. Its major built statement is the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, designed by Charles Barry with Pugin after the fire of 1834.

Academic classicism taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, blending French neoclassicism with Renaissance and Baroque ornament. It reached its apex under the Second Empire and the Third Republic and heavily influenced American building from 1880 to 1920. Grand Central Terminal, completed in 1913, is a celebrated American example.

After the fire of 1871, Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Le Baron Jenney and Dankmar Adler worked with the metal frame and the safety elevator to give the tall commercial building its modern grammar. The Home Insurance Building of 1885 is usually credited as the first complete statement, though earlier iron-framed buildings complicate any claim to a single first skyscraper.

Frank Lloyd Wright led this regional American style from Chicago beginning around 1900. Low and horizontal, with deep eaves, ribbons of art-glass windows and open interiors, it rejected applied historical ornament. Wright's 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio carried the work back across the Atlantic to Germany.

Named from the French beton brut, the raw concrete Le Corbusier left visible at the Unite d'Habitation in Marseille. From the 1950s to the 1970s it became the style of universities, housing estates and city halls worldwide, admired for honesty and monumentality and attacked for bleakness.

The path ends with fragmentation and skewed geometry, named by the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which gathered Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi and Coop Himmelblau. Computer-aided design later made its forms buildable, the Guggenheim Bilbao most famously.