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The Mystic Age in the history of Architecture is the birth and development of the Gothic in Europe, 1130-1240. Around 1130 a significant change occurred in the Christian religion. The Virgin Mary was gradually introduced as the intercessor in Church stories of the soul’s Judgement, thus bringing an element of feminine sympathy and forgiveness [...]

The extraordinary period of invention in the history of architecture ended as the increasingly hot, dry climate burnt the fields and desiccated the northern French vineyards which had funded much of this work. As the population continued to increase in spite of worsening conditions, ordinary people became poorer and wealth was increasingly concentrated among the [...]

The religion of Islam was born in the deserts of Arabia in AD 622 with the revelations of the prophet Mohammed and embodied in the Koran, the Holy Book seen by Moslems as the source of divine knowledge, the law, and the correct way of living. After the death of the Prophet Mohammed in AD [...]

Postmodern architecture was only one manifestation of the phenomenon that Portoghesi so aptly described as the end of prohibitionism. Challenges within design culture to the hegemony of modernism paralleled similar challenges to prevailing social and political norms elsewhere within contemporary society. In field after field, questions were raised concerning the fundamental assumptions on which different [...]

Hellenistic Architecture was closely related to Alexander the Great in the history of architecture. Early in the 5th century BC, although the defeat of the invading Persians gave the Greek people unchallenged prosperity and established them as the major power in the eastern Mediterranean, the individual states which composed the Greek nation never succeeded [...]

Japan has a distinct architectural tradition in the history of architecture despite its debt to foreign cultures. What Japan has learned from others, it has reinterpreted in ways more congenial to the national sensibility. In particular, there is a feeling of oneness with nature evident both in the close integration of buildings with the land?scape [...]

In the 1930s, the seeds of Modernism (Modern Architecture)were sown throughout Europe and her colonies (notably in East and South Africa). In Scandinavia, the late flowering of national romanticism had given way quite suddenly around 1930 to this new architecture; its acceptance was aided by a link with fundamental social changes. There was a growth [...]

Throughout the middle decades of the 19th century architects lacked a clear view of their role in the history of architecture. Nevertheless, William Butterfield and G. E. Street in England built magnificent urban churches quite unlike anything previously known; Alexander Thomson in Scotland and Henri Labrouste in France both produced masterworks of genuinely urban architecture [...]

The Romantic era in the history of architecture, which fundamentally changed the way Western culture perceived its art and architecture, was born 200 years ago alongside the first industrial age. Late 18th-century revolutionary France and America took the noble republics of the Greeks and Romans as their architectural models. But the hard rationalism, clarity and [...]

Renaissance architecture in the history of architecture began in the Republican city of Florence with the revolutionary work of Filippo Brunelleschi at the beginning of the 15th century. His buildings were conceived not so much as a revival of the ancient Roman heritage but rather as a reassertion of Italian values to counter the preference [...]

The pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, one of the great masterpieces of the Baroque in the history of architecture, was completed in 1772, the same year as the Coalbrookdale iron bridge. Today the bridge must receive nearly as many pilgrims, as it symbolizes the new industrial age – the birth of our times. Although a pioneering [...]

In the history of architecture, both grand and domestic Chinese buildings have used the courtyard plan almost universally since the Bronze Age (c. 1700 BC). Temples and palaces consisted of a series of linked courtyards and even the smallest domestic buildings had a single walled courtyard. In domestic architecture the courtyard was important since it [...]