Looking Back to Build Forward: Ten Revivals and Eclectic Styles from the Tudor Age to Reunified Berlin

Start with the original. Tudor architecture is the English building style of 1485 to 1603, a period when the Perpendicular Gothic was gradually replaced by a Renaissance look arriving by way of France and the Low Countries, and when brick spread from a luxury to common use in eastern England. Its signature features include the low pointed Tudor arch and increasingly elaborate oriel windows.

The frame for everything that follows. Revivalism is the use of design elements from an earlier era, and more narrowly a Western movement from the mid eighteenth century into the early twentieth, tied to the idea that a nation expresses its character in its buildings. Neoclassical and Gothic Revival were its two most prominent strands, and Modernism eventually succeeded it.

Greek Revival shows revivalism serving a national story. In the United States and Canada it was popular from about 1800 to 1860, and the Bank of Pennsylvania of 1798 is recognized as the first American building to use Greek orders. The War of 1812 pushed Americans away from British traditions such as the Adam style, and the Greek War of Independence made Greek forms admired.

Rundbogenstil, the round-arch style, blends Byzantine, Romanesque and Renaissance elements. German architects led by Heinrich Hubsch developed it as a deliberate reaction against neo-Gothic, aiming at a distinctly German national architecture, and it traveled with German emigrants to Central Europe, England, Hungary and the United States.

Here the Gothic returns in strong colour. High Victorian Gothic grew from the writing of John Ruskin and is marked by polychrome decoration and varied texture. Its practitioners included William Butterfield, Sir Gilbert Scott, G. E. Street and Alfred Waterhouse, whose Victoria Building at Liverpool University inspired the term red brick university. It reached the United States in the early 1860s.

Baroque Revival, also called Neo-Baroque, reused the sculptural richness of the original Baroque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Baroque forms were core teaching at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the style expressed imperial confidence in Britain and France and pride in national power in newly unified Germany and Italy.

Eclecticism changes the aim from imitation to invention. Architects combined elements from more than one historical period into a single deliberately original design, chosen for how well they suited the building and its setting. The approach flourished through the Beaux-Arts tradition in France, Victorian eclecticism in England and the Grunderzeit style in Germany, and was most popular in North America between roughly 1883 and 1926.

Eclecticism also crossed cultures. Japanese-Western Eclectic Architecture, known as Wayo Secchu Kenchiku, intentionally combined Japanese and Western components in one building. It emerged in Yokohama in the Bakumatsu period of 1853 to 1867 and spread after the 1868 Meiji Restoration, with early examples including the First National Bank of Japan of 1872 and the Kaichi School Museum building of 1876.

The Tudor look returns as suburban fashion. Stockbroker's Tudor put pastiche Tudor detailing on British houses in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the Metroland suburbs around London. Osbert Lancaster coined the name in his 1938 book Pillar to Post, and he noted the irony that these copies of historic cottages came with central heating and a garage.

The trail ends with a revival of a different kind. Berlin Style is a neotraditional movement that emerged around 1990 during German reunification, favouring streamlined design with sparse decoration and drawing on Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Grunderzeit architecture, early Modernism and Art Deco. The rebuilt Hotel Adlon of 1995 to 1997 became a defining early work, though it was controversial in the profession.