Nine Named Styles: A Chronological Survey from Romanesque Weight to Postmodern Wit

Romanesque is where the trail begins, the architecture of Europe from roughly the year 1000 to the mid twelfth century. Look for round arches, massive walls, small windows and barrel or groin vaults on heavy piers in monastic churches and pilgrimage basilicas. The atlas notes that its weight and darkness are exactly what the Gothic system was invented to overcome.

The Renaissance turns back to the classical language of Rome, beginning in fifteenth century Florence and prizing symmetry, proportion and the orders as Vitruvius described them. The atlas names Brunelleschi, who opened it with the dome of Florence Cathedral, Alberti, who gave it a theory, and Palladio, who carried it into the villa and the pattern book.

Baroque takes that classical language and stages it as drama in seventeenth century Rome: curved facades, oval plans, sculptural ornament and light arranged for emotional effect. It served the Counter-Reformation church and the absolute monarchies, with Bernini and Borromini defining it in Rome and Versailles carrying it to the scale of a state.

Neoclassicism, from the mid eighteenth century, is a return to Greek and Roman severity, spurred by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii and by a reaction against Baroque and Rococo excess. Its porticoes, domes and columns became the language of the new republics and public institutions, as in the government buildings of Washington.

Art Nouveau is a short, intense movement of roughly 1890 to 1910 that wanted a wholly new ornamental language in the curving lines of plants and organic growth, applied to iron, glass and tile. Victor Horta in Brussels and Hector Guimard in Paris defined it in building, and Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona carried its organic impulse further.

Art Deco takes its name from the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs and favors stepped profiles, sunbursts, zigzags and rich materials, machine-age optimism made ornamental. The atlas points to the New York skyscrapers of the boom years, the Chrysler Building above all, as its greatest monuments.

Modernism, the broad twentieth century movement, rejected historical styles and applied ornament in favor of forms derived from function, structure and the new materials of steel, glass and reinforced concrete. The atlas lists Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright as its central figures, whose ideas reshaped cities on every continent.

The International Style is the name Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson gave, in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition and book, to the shared language of the new European architecture: volume rather than mass, regularity rather than symmetry, and no applied ornament. After the Second World War it became the default dress of the corporate office tower.

Postmodernism closes the path as the reaction against modernist austerity that gathered from the late 1960s, readmitting ornament, historical quotation, color and wit. Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1966 was its founding text, and the Portland Building and the AT and T Building with its broken pediment top are among its landmarks.