Architecture-Building & Construction

The Grundtvig Church, Copenhagen, was designed by the Danish architect P.V. Jensen-Klint in 1922. The art deco design is based in part on a style of ecclesiastical architecture that used stepped gable ends and was common in Zeeland during the Middle Ages.SEF/Art Resource, NY

In many countries of northern Europe the elegance and dignity attainable through adherence to classic rules of composition retained appeal, while in... central and southern Europe and Scandinavia, baroque and rococo ran their course. In England, the duke of Marlborough’s great Blenheim Palace, designed (1705) by Sir John Vanbrugh, emulated in rougher and reduced form the grandeur of Versailles.

A renewed interest in Palladio and his follower Inigo Jones emerged. Development of the resort city of Bath gave opportunities to John Wood and his son to apply Palladian classicism to the design of Queen’s Square (1728), the Circus (1754-1770), and finally the great Royal Crescent (1767-1775), in all of which the individual houses were made to conform to an encompassing classic order. Robert Adam popularized classicism, expressing it notably through delicate stucco ornamentation. Historical scholarship became more precise, and true Greek architecture—including such pure examples of Doric as the Parthenon—became known to architects through the 1762 publication by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett of Antiquities of Athens. These developments reinforced the grip of neoclassicism in England, and the resulting type of architecture became popularly known as the Georgian style.

Osterley Park House in Middlesex, England, was redesigned in the neoclassical style by Scottish-English architect Robert Adam. The style, known as Georgian, is characterized by symmetry and straight lines. It was influenced by the 16th-century Palladian architectural style and inspired by classical Greek and Roman ruins. Adam’s new designs for Osterley Park were executed between 1761 and 1780.


In what was to become the northeastern United States, Peter Harrison and Samuel McIntire took their cues from English architects in their own version of Georgian architecture, which was called Federal after the United States won independence. In the Southeast, with an aristocracy predominantly rural, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and others derived their building style more directly from Palladio. Jefferson, whose early virtuosity had been demonstrated in Monticello (1770-1784), was also moved by ancient Rome, and placed a version (1817-1826) of the Pantheon at the head of his magnificent Lawn at the University of Virginia. See Neoclassical Art and Architecture.

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Italian Baroque Architecture

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane The church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, Italy, built from 1638 to 1641, was designed by Italian architect and sculptor Francesco Borromini in the baroque architectural style. The church’s facade, begun in 1665 and finished in 1667, just after Borromini’s death, features a statue of Saint Charles Borromeo over the main portal, surrounded by a canopy of winged figures. Designed as a pinched oval, the church’s overall shape exhibits a strong tension that helps create the drama and motion characteristic of baroque architecture.Scala/Art Resource, NY

Italians were the pioneers of baroque; the best known was the architect-sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, designer of the great oval plaza (begun 1656) in front of St. Peter’s. Francesco Borromini produced two masterpieces, both on an intimate scale, in Rome. San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-1641; facade completed 1667) distorts the dome on pendentives into a coffered ellipse to stretch the space into a longitudinal axis; its facade undulates, entablature and all. The plan of Sant’Ivo della Sapienza (begun 1642) is based on two intersecting equilateral triangles that produce six niches of alternating shapes; these shapes, defined by pilasters and ribs, rise through what would ordinarily be a dome, continuing the hexagonal concept from floor to lantern.

Guarino Guarini designed a church in Turin, San Lorenzo (1668-1687), with eight intersecting ribs that offer interstices for letting in daylight. His even more astonishing Cappella della Santa Sindone (Chapel of the Holy Shroud, 1667-1694), also in Turin, has a cone-shaped hexagonal dome created by six segmental arches rising in eight staggered tiers.

French Baroque Architecture

Palace of Versailles Under the direction of Louis XIV, king of France, a royal hunting lodge outside of Paris was transformed into the magnificent Palace of Versailles during the late 17th century. The complex, comprised of lavishly decorated galleries and... salons, formal gardens with fountains and sculptures, and royal villas, was designated a national museum in 1837.Denis Tremblay Labtex Inc.

Seventeenth-century French architects also designed baroque churches, one of their greatest being part of Les Invalides, Paris (1676-1706), by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The best French talent, however, was absorbed in the secular service of Louis XIV and his government. The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (1657-1661) is a grandiose ensemble representing the collaboration of the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Lebrun, and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre. The Sun King was so impressed that he engaged these designers to rebuild the Château de Versailles on a truly regal scale. The Palace of Versailles became the center of government and was continuously enlarged between 1667 and 1710. Bernini submitted designs for enlarging the Louvre in Paris, but Claude Perrault was finally awarded that commission (executed 1667-1679). French architecture of le grand siècle lacks the exuberance of Italian baroque, but its designers achieved the epitome of elegance.

English Baroque Architecture

Saint Paul's Cathedral In designing Saint Paul’s Cathedral, English architect Christopher Wren, also known as a scientist and mathematician, was heavily influenced by the style known as baroque architecture, previously unknown to England. After the great London fire of 1666 destroyed the old Saint Paul’s, the city commissioned Wren to design a replacement. Wren drew from the baroque style then popular in France and Italy. The facade of Wren’s Saint Paul’s resembles the east front of the Louvre art museum in Paris, France, while the central dome recalls the baroque grandeur of the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome, Italy.Scala/Art Resource, NY

In England the rebuilding of London after the 1666 fire brought to prominence the many-talented Sir Christopher Wren, whose masterpiece is Saint Paul’s Cathedral (1675-1710). He also designed or influenced the design of many other English churches. Among other innovations, Wren introduced the single square tower belfry with tall spire that became the hallmark of church architecture in England and the United States.

Baroque Urban Design

Baroque thinking powerfully addressed the area of urban design. Michelangelo’s Campidoglio (Capitol, 1538-1564) in Rome had already provided a model for the public square, and villas such as Vignola’s Villa Farnese (begun 1539) in Caprarola showed how these important buildings could extend axial ties into the townscape. Baroque church facades frequently had more to do with their accompanying piazzas than with the church interiors. Often, whole new towns were built on formal principles. Early in the 18th century Peter the Great brought Italian and French baroque architects to Russia to create Saint Petersburg. In the New World were built such large urban centers as Mexico City; Santiago, Chile; Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala; Philadelphia; Savannah, Georgia; and Washington, D.C. See Baroque Art and Architecture.

Rococo Architecture

Benedictine Abbey at Ottobeuren The Benedictine abbey at Ottobeuren, Austria, (1748-54) was designed by Johann Michael Fischer, an 18th-century Bavarian architect. The abbey is based on a conventional basilica design. The exterior, though baroque, is relatively simple and restrained, in contrast to the interior which is extremely ornate.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

When Louis XIV died (1715), changes in the artistic climate led to the exuberant rococo style. Once again the work of Italians—notably Guarini and Filippo Juvarra—provided the basis for a new thrust. The expression of royal grandeur has survived in Paris’s Place de la Concorde (begun 1753) by Jacques Ange Gabriel and the great axis and plazas (1751-1759) by Héré de Corny at Nancy. A more intimate and personal expression appears in Gabriel’s Petit Trianon (1762-1764) at Versailles. Rococo came to full flower, however, in Bavaria and Austria. The Austrian Benedictine Abbey (1748-1754) at Ottobeuren by Johann Michael Fischer is only one of a brilliant series of spectacular churches, monasteries, and palaces that includes Balthasar Neumann’s opulent Vierzehnheiligen (Church of the Fourteen Saints, 1743-1772) near Bamberg, Germany, and the Amalienburg Pavilion (1734-1739) by the Flemish-born Bavarian architect François de Cuvilliés in the park at Nymphenburg near Munich


The many elaborate colonial churches found throughout Central and South America attest to the power and influence of the Roman Catholic church during baroque and rococo times. They include cathedrals in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico; Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala; Quito, Ecuador; Ouro Prêto, Brazil; and Cuzco, Peru; as well as such northern missions as Sant’ Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona, and the chain of missions on the California coast. The Spanish architect José Churriguera developed an extremely elaborate decorative style that, transferred to Latin America and somewhat debased, was given the name Churrigueresque. See Latin American Architecture.

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Italian Renaissance Architecture

Tempietto The Tempietto (1502) was designed by Donato Bramante, one of the greatest architects of the Italian Renaissance. The building, with a domed rotunda and surrounded by columns, was commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to commemorate St. Peter’s crucifixion. It is located in Rome, in a convent called San Pietro in Montorio.Art Resource, NY

The families who governed rival cities in northern Italy in the 15th century—de Medici, Sforza, da Montefeltro, and others—had become wealthy enough through commerce to become patrons of the arts. People of leisure began to take serious scholarly interest in the neglected Latin culture—its literature, its art, and its architecture, whose ruins lay about them.



From Lives of the Artists: Brunelleschi
Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi played a key role in the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. One of his crowning achievements was the design and construction of the enormous dome on Florence’s cathedral (1294-1436), which is dedicated to Santa Maria del Fiore and is also known as the Duomo. Many historians consider Brunelleschi’s double-shelled dome, spanning 39 m (130 ft) at its base, to be the most impressive architectural work of the 15th century. In this passage from Italian writer and artist Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, revised 1568), Vasari told how Brunelleschi won the commission for the construction of the dome.

Early in the 15th century the city of Florence was in the process of completing its cathedral. Piers had already been erected to support a dome almost as large as that of the Pantheon in Rome. A proposal for its completion was submitted by Filippo Brunelleschi, who had studied Roman structural solutions. His constructed dome (1420-1436) is derived from Rome but is different; it is of masonry, is octagonal, has inner and outer shells connected by ribs, is pointed and rises higher, and is crowned with a lantern. Its drum with circular windows stands alone without buttressing, for the base contains a tension ring—huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps and topped with heavy iron chains. Two additional tension rings are contained within the dome’s double shells. Brunelleschi stood at the threshold between Gothic and Renaissance. His Pazzi Chapel (begun 1441?), also in Florence, is a clear statement of new principles of proportion and design.

A new type of urban building evolved at this time—the palazzo, or city residence of a prominent family. The palazzi were several stories high; rooms were grouped around a cortile, or courtyard; the outer walls of the palazzo were on the lot lines.

The Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his design for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446-1451), employed in its facade three superposed classic orders, much as in the Roman Colosseum, except that he used pilasters instead of engaged columns. They seem to have been engraved in the... wall plane; the resulting compartmentalization of the facade provides a logical setting for the windows.

Alberti also published in 1485 the first book on architectural theory since Vitruvius, which became a major influence in promoting classicism.






From Lives of the Artists: Giulio Romano
Sixteenth-century Italian painter and architect Giulio Romano was one of the chief initiators of Mannerism, an art style that departed from the harmonious proportions of the Renaissance artists, and added discordant, overly stylized, and ambiguous elements. Giulio’s greatest architectural achievement was the Palazzo del Tè (begun about 1525) in Mantua, Italy. In his Lives of the Artists (1550; revised 1568), Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari discussed the works and life of Giulio, including his famous room in the Palazzo del Tè depicting the fall of the Titans. In this room, the illusion of architectural collapse in his murals and in the structure of the room itself merge to give an overall impression of tumult and destruction.


In the 16th century, Rome became the leading center for the new architecture. The Milanese architect Donato Bramante practiced in Rome beginning in 1499. His Tempietto (1502), an elegantly proportioned circular temple in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, was one of the earliest Renaissance structures in Rome.

Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican is a masterpiece of 16th century Italian architecture. Some of Italy’s finest artists of the time, including Michelangelo, worked on its design and decoration. Notable features include the central dome, designed by Michelangelo, and the high altar, which according to church tradition stands over the tomb of the apostle Peter. Only the Pope may conduct mass at the high altar.Denis Tremblay Labtex Inc.

The erection of a new basilica of Saint Peter in Vatican City was the most important of many 16th-century projects. In drawing the first plan (1503-1506) Bramante rejected the Western basilica concept in favor of a Greek cross of equal arms with a central dome. Popes who came after Julius II, however, appointed other architects—notably Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno—and, when the church was completed in 1612, the Latin cross form had been imposed with a lengthened nave. Michelangelo’s dome, ribbed and with a lantern, is a logical development from Brunelleschi’s in Florence. It rises in a high oval and is the prototype not only for later churches but for many state capitol buildings in the United States.

Toward the middle of the 16th century such leading architects as Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, and Giacomo da Vignola began to use the classical Roman elements in ways that did not conform to the rules that governed designs in the early Renaissance. Arches, columns, and entablatures came to be used as devices to introduce drama through depth recession, asymmetry, and unexpected proportions and scales. This tendency, called Mannerism, is exemplified by Giulio’s sophisticated Palazzo del Tè (1526-1534) at Mantua (Mantova).

The architect Andrea Palladio practiced in the environs of Vicenza and Venice. Although he visited Rome, he did not wholly adopt the Mannerist approach. He specialized in villas for gentleman farmers. These villas explore all the variations on the classical norms: governing axis defined in the approach, single major entrance, single major interior space surrounded by smaller rooms, secondary functions extended in symmetrical arms, and careful attention to proportion. They were immortalized by Palladio’s publication The Four Books of Architecture (1570; trans. 1738), in which drawings for them appear, with the dimensions written into the plans to emphasize Palladio’s harmonic series of dimensions that govern the major proportions. These books later enabled Inigo Jones in England and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to propagate Palladian principles among the gentleman farmers of their times. In two large Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and II Redentore (1577), Palladio made important contributions toward the adaptation of classic ideas to the liturgical and formal traditions of Roman Catholicism.

Northern Renaissance Architecture

Renaissance ideas had spread rapidly to France by 1494. French royal policy was to attract Italian artists (beginning with Leonardo da Vinci in 1506) while at the same time encouraging and developing native talent. It is believed that the Italian architect Domenico da Cortona designed the extraordinary Château de Chambord that Francis I built (1519-1547) in the Loire Valley, which retains outward characteristics of a medieval castle. The French architects Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder and Philibert Delorme worked at Fontainebleau, and Delorme was architect for the Château d’Anet, where Benvenuto Cellini was employed as sculptor. In Paris, work on the Louvre was undertaken by Pierre Lescot in 1546.

Philip II of Spain engaged Juan de Herrera and Juan Bautista de Toledo as architects for his colossal Escorial (1563-1584) near Madrid—half palace, half monastery. England was somewhat slower to change. Inigo Jones, its principal early Renaissance architect, visited Italy and emulated Palladio in such works as the Banqueting House (1619-1622) in Whitehall, London. See Renaissance Art and Architecture.

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