Greek Revival architecture
May 27, 2009 by blogtopia
Filed under Architectural style
The Greek Revival was an architectural movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States. A product of Hellenism, it may be looked upon as the last phase in the development of Neoclassical architecture. The term was first used by Charles Robert Cockerell in a lecture he gave as Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy in 1842.
The term is indicative of how highly self-conscious practitioners of the style were, and that they realized they had created a new mode of architecture. With a newfound access to Greece, archaeologist-architects of the period studied the Doric and Ionic movement, examples of which can be found in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Finland (where the assembly of Greek buildings in Helsinki city centre is particularly notable). Yet in each country it touched, the style was looked on as the expression of local nationalism and civic virtue, especially in Germany and the United States where the idiom was regarded as being free from ecclesiastical and aristocratic associations.
The taste for all things Greek in furniture and interior design was at its peak by the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the designs of Thomas Hope had influenced a number of decorative styles known variously as Neoclassical, Empire, Russian Empire, and Regency. Greek Revival architecture took a different course in a number of countries, lasting up till the Civil War in America (1860s) and even later in Scotland. The style was also exported to Greece under the first two (German and Danish) kings of the newly independent nation.
With the rise of architectural historicism in the mid-nineteenth century it is no longer possible to speak of a Greek revival movement, where the Doric is employed it is as another self-consciously anachronizing style. The San Francisco mint (completed 1874) is a case in point. Yet Greek culture and Greek design motifs continued to exert a powerful hold on late Victorian imagination and beyond. Peter Behrens’s Haus Wiegund (1911-12), for example, echos the austere classicism of Gilly and Schinkel. Further nort
h we find a resurgent interest in rationalism dressed in the neoclassical style; Nordic Classicism. If the idiom has fallen out of favour since World War II it is thanks to its association, rightly or wrongly, with the pastiche classicism of Albert Speer which still provokes controversy as witnessed in Léon Krier’s provocative essay “Krier on Speer".
Links
- Ruffner, Jr., Clifford H., Study of Greek Revival Architecture in the Seneca and Cayuga Lake Regions