Neoclassical architecture

Neoclassical architecture was an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century, both as a reaction against the Rococo style of anti-tectonic naturalistic ornament, and an outgrowth of some classicizing features of Late Baroque. In its purest form it is a style principally derived from the architecture of Classical Greece and the architecture of Italian Andrea Palladio.

Siegfried Giedion, whose first book (1922) had the suggestive title Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism, asserted later "The Louis XVI style formed in shape and structure the end of late baroque tendencies, with classicism serving as its framework." In the sense that neoclassicism in architecture is evocative and picturesque, a recreation of a distant, lost world, it is, as Giedion suggests, framed within the Romantic sensibility.

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Italianate architecture

The Italianate style of architecture was a distinct nineteenth-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. In the Italianate style, the models and architectural vocabulary of sixteenth-century Italian architecture, which had served as inspiration for both Palladianism and Neoclassicism, were synthesized with picturesque aesthetics. The style of architecture that was thus created, though also characterized as "Neo-Renaissance", was essentially of its own time. "The backward look transforms its object," Siegfried Giedion wrote of historicist architectural styles; "every spectator at every period—at every moment, indeed—inevitably transforms the past according to his own nature."

The Italianate style was first developed in Britain about 1802 by John Nash, with the construction of Cronkhill in Shropshire. This small country house is generally accepted to be the first Italianate villa in England, from which is derived the Italianate architecture of the late Regency and early Victorian eras.

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Classical architecture

Classical architecture is the set of building styles and techniques of Classical Greece, as used in ancient Greece, the Hellenistic period, and the Roman empire. In architectural history, Classical architecture also includes later and modern styles derived from Greek sources, while archaeological usage is more strictly limited to the Classical period.

Most of the styles originating in post-renaissance Europe can be described as classical architecture. This broad use of the term is employed by Sir John Summerson in The Classical Language of Architecture.

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