One Style, Many Places: Eleven Regional and Revived Forms, Portuguese Romanesque to Brick Expressionism

The Romanesque style reached Portugal between the end of the eleventh century and the start of the twelfth, first in the Minho and Douro regions in the north. The Reconquista gave it a fortress-like look, with thick walls, narrow openings and little ornament beyond portals and windows. Braga, Porto, Viseu, Coimbra and Lisbon all received Romanesque cathedrals, most during the reign of Afonso Henriques from 1139 to 1185.

Gothic begins here: Abbot Suger started rebuilding the Basilica of Saint-Denis in the Ile-de-France in 1140. The rib vault and flying buttress carried weight to exterior supports, allowing greater height and larger windows. French scholars divide the style into Primary Gothic, Classic Gothic, Rayonnant and Flamboyant, and it lasted until the mid-sixteenth century.

Compare this with the north. After the church defeated the Cathars in the early thirteenth century, the Toulouse region built churches that borrowed from military architecture. The result is plainer than northern Gothic and uses brick rather than stone, and it later influenced secular buildings too.

Baroque grew out of the Counter-Reformation in late sixteenth century Italy, as the Church sought art that would appeal to worshippers. Its drama shows in marble, domes and theatrical columns, in Bernini's Sant'Andrea al Quirinale of 1658 and Borromini's San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Later works include Juvarra's Basilica of Superga of 1717 and Longhena's Santa Maria della Salute in Venice.

England took up Baroque for a short span, between the Great Fire of London in 1666 and about 1720, when Palladianism replaced it with more restrained rules. It is chiefly the work of Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Vanbrugh and James Gibbs, and its qualities also show in Queen Anne and early Georgian building.

A nineteenth century local case: this neoclassical style of houses and public buildings in Puerto Rico, especially Ponce, is named for the architect Manuel V. Domenech of Isabela. Ponce City Hall and the Puerto Rico Courthouse for the Ponce district are among its notable buildings.

From about 1840 to 1890, architects revived Renaissance precedent instead of the Greek or Gothic models more common in the period. They blended Italian, French and Flemish sources with Mannerist and Baroque elements, using rusticated masonry, quoins, pedimented doors and strong cornice lines. The boundary with neighboring revival styles is often hard to draw.

Paris under Napoleon III supplied the model for this style, popular in the United States and Canada between 1865 and 1900. Its mark is the mansard roof, along with elaborate ornament and strong massing, and it suited public and commercial buildings as well as some houses.

Nineteenth and twentieth century builders also borrowed the town palaces of wealthy Italian Renaissance families. The term names a general shape of symmetry, cornice, basement and tidy window rows. By the late nineteenth century it was stretched to commercial buildings much larger than the originals, and later Postmodern city buildings used it again.

Late nineteenth and early twentieth century North America turned to Oxford and Cambridge for school and college buildings. This subgenre of Gothic Revival replaced the more restless High Victorian Gothic with a more scholarly manner. Ralph Adams Cram argued that such buildings could shape people and communicate truth.

The last stop shifts from revival to invention. Built mostly in the 1920s in northern Germany and the Ruhr, with the Amsterdam School as its Dutch counterpart, this style made ornament from the setting of brick itself, using colored clinker, alternating courses and even damaged bricks. That differs from the Bauhaus rejection of applied ornament.