Ideas Before Forms: Twelve Styles Defined by a Doctrine, from Terrifying Prisons to Space Habitats

Jacques-Francois Blondel argued in his Cours d'architecture, published between 1771 and 1777, that a prison should look like one, so that its heaviness would deter and announce the confinement inside. London's second Newgate Prison, built between 1768 and 1775, is the example given, with nearly windowless reinforced walls and carved chains over its entrances. Here the doctrine is that form must proclaim function.

The name joins ferro, for iron, with vitreous, for glass, and the approach became defining during the Industrial Revolution as iron and steel production expanded across Europe. It was often used for the buildings raised for world exhibitions, and Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, the Palm House at Kew Gardens and the Coal Exchange in London are the named examples. The doctrine here comes from a material rather than from a theory.

Beginning in the British Isles in the 1880s as a reaction against industrial mass production, the movement took its name from a term used by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at an 1887 society meeting. In architecture it rejected historical revival styles for an honest British vernacular, with wide porches, steep roofs, brick fireplaces and visible wooden fittings. It had largely run its course in Britain by about 1920, so it is the first stop that argues against the machine.

The principle that a building should be designed solely on its purpose and practical use arose as an international movement after the First World War, with strong early adoption in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union and the Netherlands. It reached its greatest prominence from the 1920s through the 1960s and was often linked with social reform. The atlas also records that architects and critics still dispute what functionalism actually requires, which is worth holding in mind against the neat slogan.

Danish design carried functionalism into the home, combining new industrial technologies with simplicity under the influence of the German Bauhaus school, and it took shape after the Second World War. It treated buildings, furniture and household objects as one sensibility, and the Egg chair and PH lamps remain in production. Its best known architectural work is the Sydney Opera House by the Danish architect Jorn Utzon.

The term comes from a 1960 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art and describes designs that exist only on paper or display idealistic or impractical qualities. Paper architects work in drawings, collages and models, and the atlas names Etienne-Louis Boullee, Antonio Sant Elia, Lebbeus Woods, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas among them. The label carries a pejorative history, having been used to marginalize such architects from the mainstream.

Zoomorphic architecture takes animal forms as the blueprint for a building, drawing on biological processes and organic shapes rather than the rigid geometry of Modernism, and it emerged partly as a reaction to Modernism's separation from the natural world. Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center in New York City and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee Art Museum are both shaped to evoke the form of bird wings.

Retrofuturism depicts the future as earlier eras imagined it, blending nostalgic period styles with futuristic technology. The term first appeared in print in a 1981 concert review, and in architecture it leans on Googie and Populuxe, as in the 1961 Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, built to resemble a landed spacecraft. Some critics regard it as a nostalgic loop rather than a source of genuine innovation, a dispute the entry itself records.

Also called New Modernism, this is a reaction to the complexity and eclecticism of postmodern architecture, seeking a return to simplicity. It rejects classical ornamentation and pre-modernist tradition and prizes utility and economy over decoration. It has continued as a dominant form of building, particularly corporate architecture, into the twenty-first century, and its outlook has been described as individualism rather than a single dictated look.

Slow architecture grew out of the slow food movement of the mid-1980s and favors gradual, organic building over rapid construction driven by short term commercial pressure. It asks for thoughtful design that reduces environmental and carbon impact and fits its neighborhood. The 2011 Pritzker Prize winner Eduardo Souto de Moura is cited in this spirit, and so is Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, still under construction more than a century after it began.

Aerospace architecture designs habitable and non-habitable structures for aerospace settings, balancing function, production, value and appearance. For crewed environments the comfort of the people inside matters more over long confinement in microgravity, and the International Space Station used pastel wall colors to help crew members orient themselves. It shows a doctrine of human centered design pushed to its furthest setting.

The architecture of the twenty-first century has no single dominant style, and architects work across postmodernism, high-tech, new classical interpretations and conceptual sculptural forms. Computer-aided design is universal, and unlike twentieth century Modernism, which was concentrated in the Americas and Western Europe, significant buildings now emerge from China, Russia, India and the Persian Gulf. A concurrent traditionalist response from New Classical architects closes the path with the old argument still running.