Named by Place, Patron and Moment: Twelve Styles from Herod's Judaea to the Mediterranean Revival

Start with one ruler: Herodian architecture is the style of the building projects of Herod the Great, who ruled Judaea as a client kingdom of Rome from 37 to 4 BC. It is best known for his rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem, and for palaces at Masada, Jericho, Caesarea and the Herodium that were placed for dramatic views and mixed local kurkar and limestone with imported materials.

Move to a medieval workshop craft. Cosmatesque is geometric inlay stonework from medieval Italy, centred on Rome, named after the Cosmati, a leading family workshop. It was used chiefly on church floors, and also on walls, pulpits and bishops' thrones, and the style reached Westminster Abbey's high altar floor.

The kancha is an Inca walled enclosure around a central courtyard, lined with single-room buildings that face inward and usually entered by one gate. Its examples include the Coricancha sun temple in Cusco and compounds at Ollantaytambo, and several kanchas were set side by side to form urban blocks.

A vernacular tradition built by Jewish communities, chiefly between the mid sixteenth and mid seventeenth centuries. Timber was cheap and permits for masonry synagogues were hard to obtain, so plain exteriors hid painted ceilings called rakia, the Hebrew word for sky. Nearly all were destroyed in the Second World War, and none survive in Poland.

A house type of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao that came from Venezuela's Paraguana Peninsula. Walls of Y-shaped wooden posts were woven with branches and sealed with torto, a loam and grass mix, then limed white. It was the predominant dwelling from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth, and by 2005 only sixty two remained on Aruba.

A hybrid of Chinese and Portuguese elements, also called Chinese Baroque or Straits Eclectic. It grew up where Chinese settlers lived in southern China and among the Peranakans of the Malay Peninsula, and its best preserved examples are in Singapore, with others historically in Macau, Medan, Vietnam and Hainan.

Spa architecture is a collective term for buildings made for rest and health treatment, not a single uniform style. By the nineteenth century the central Kurhaus held social halls for gaming, reading and dining, while drinking halls and bath houses were separate buildings, often beside hotels, villas and theaters.

Gründerzeit means founders' period, the German and Austro-Hungarian boom in companies, banks and railways that peaked between the Franco-Prussian War and the 1873 crash. The style it names lasted until 1914: richly decorated urban buildings of four to six stories by private developers, drawing on Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque revivals.

The same boom logic in Melbourne. Boom style names the lavish architecture of the 1883 to 1891 land boom, fed by gold rush wealth. The term turned derogatory after the 1889 collapse, and the bad debts and corruption that followed helped justify the demolition of many of these buildings.

An informal term for tiered buildings whose levels are each set back from the one below. In New York it became predominant after the 1916 Zoning Resolution required setbacks, producing the ziggurat profile that shaped Art Deco, and a classically detailed version also marks Stalinist architecture in Russia.

End with a coastal revival. Mediterranean Revival draws on Spain, Italy, southern France and Greece, and flourished in the 1920s and 1930s in Florida and California. Typical buildings have stuccoed walls, red tiled roofs, arched windows and wrought iron balconies, and were used for hotels, apartments and residences.

Close with the idea behind the whole path. Traditional architecture is defined by its geographical or cultural context, not a single style or period, and it does not exclude architect designed or monumental buildings. Local builders keep adapting techniques, so the forms on this path are traditions in motion, not fixed types.