Greek Revival architecture

movement style c. 1750s-1860s Great Britain Germany

Greek Revival architecture revived the forms of ancient Greek building - the temple front, the Doric and Ionic orders, the pediment - as the last phase of Neoclassicism. It began in the middle of the 18th century, when James 'Athenian' Stuart and Nicholas Revett returned from Greece with the measured drawings published as The Antiquities of Athens (1762), and it flourished from the 1780s through the 1840s. The style spoke civic virtue and nationalism: Germany raised the Brandenburg Gate and Schinkel's Berlin; Britain built museums, churches, and Edinburgh's 'Athens of the North'; the young United States made it a national idiom; independent Greece rebuilt Athens in it. Prized for its purity and seriousness, it nonetheless lost the Battle of the Styles to Gothic Revival by the 1840s, lingering longest in Scotland.

Brandenburg gate in Berlin
Brandenburg gate in BerlinCC BY 4.0 (credit: Pierre-Selim Huard) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Temple fronts with Greek orders: thick fluted Doric or Ionic columns rising straight from the stylobate
  • Pedimented porticoes and strict bilateral symmetry
  • Severe, uncluttered surfaces in white or pale stone, rejecting ornate continental decoration
  • Sculpted pediments and Doric entablatures copied from archaeological surveys of ruined temples
  • Temple-style fronts while the other faces stay practical, since Greek temples had no windows
  • Low-pitched or flat roofs behind the cornice

Key figures

  • James "Athenian" Stuart (1713-1788) — Surveyed Greek ruins and published The Antiquities of Athens; built the first Greek temple front in England
  • Nicholas Revett (1720-1804) — Architect and surveyor, co-author of The Antiquities of Athens and designer of early Greek temples
  • Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) — Prussian court architect whose Altes Museum and Neue Wache made Greek forms Berlin's civic language
  • Leo von Klenze (1784-1864) — Bavarian architect of the Glyptothek and Walhalla, the era's grandest Greek Revival monuments
  • William Wilkins (1778-1839) — Designer of Downing College and the National Gallery who made Greek the dominant idiom for British public buildings

Example works

Sources

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