Local Stone, Brick and Timber: Ten Regional Styles from Lombard Italy to the San Francisco Bay

The path begins with the Kingdom of the Lombards, which ruled in Italy from 568 to 774. Lacking a building tradition of their own, the Lombards relied on local craftsmen, introduced taller central volumes and gradually absorbed Classical and Byzantine influence. UNESCO inscribed the principal surviving sites in 2011 as Longobards in Italy, Places of Power.

Asturian architecture is the pre-Romanesque style of the Kingdom of Asturias in northwestern Spain, framed between 711 and 910. It grew as the kingdom took back territory and moved its capital from Cangas de Onis through Pravia to Oviedo, and it blended Visigothic and Mozarabic building with local tradition.

First Romanesque, also called Lombard Romanesque, arose in Lombardy in the tenth and early eleventh centuries and spread to Catalonia and southern France. Look for the Lombard bands, shallow blind arches on thick walls with little facade sculpture. Lombard stonemasons and the Comacine Guild carried it across its range.

Brabantine Gothic appeared in the first half of the fourteenth century at St. Rumbold Cathedral in Mechelen and shaped church building in the Low Countries for about two centuries. It favoured light sandstone or limestone, round columns with cabbage-leaf capitals and a more modest scale than French Gothic. In waterlogged Holland and Zeeland, builders swapped stone vaults for wooden barrel vaults.

Dutch brick, or IJsselsteen, is a small red brick fired from clay of the river IJssel, and also a style of building with it, marked by rounded or stepped gables. The bricks travelled as ballast to Britain and the colonies, and Trinity College Dublin was first built of red Dutch brick. The Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town and Christ Church in Malacca also used Dutch brick.

Portuguese Plain Style, Estilo Chao, arose under King John III in the sixteenth century as a deliberate departure from the ornate Manueline style. George Kubler likened it to vernacular architecture and a living dialect rather than Classical principles. Its first hall churches of the 1550s stand in Leiria, Portalegre and Miranda do Douro, and its simple forms were easily repeated across the Portuguese Empire.

A culă is a semi-fortified tower house of Romania's Oltenia region, built mainly between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries by local boyars as protection against invasions and uprisings. The name comes from the Turkish kule, meaning tower. Thick walls and narrow loopholes joined family comfort to defence, and Serbia and Albania hold counterparts.

The Second Bay Tradition, also called redwood post and beam, ran from 1928 to 1942 in San Francisco and the wider Bay Area. It joined a rustic, woodsy outlook to sleek lines and a machine aesthetic. William Wurster, Gardner Dailey, Henry Hill and William Merchant led it, and Wurster's 1928 Gregory Farmhouse in Scotts Valley is an early example.

Mar del Plata style is an eclectic vernacular of houses that began in the Argentine resort city of Mar del Plata and was most popular between 1935 and 1950. Typical features are stone facades, pitched roofs with dormers, attached garages and arched porches, built above all in the local orthoquartzite known as Piedra Mar del Plata. It marked the city's change from seasonal resort to permanent town.

The path ends with Português Suave, promoted by Portugal's Estado Novo regime mainly in the 1940s and early 1950s and officially called Estilo Português. It took its popular name from a brand of cigarettes. The label Estado Novo style is imprecise, since the regime also used Art Deco, the Modern movement and later the International Style on public buildings.