Greek Revival architecture: how to read the temple front

Greek Revival architecture is the style that turned banks, churches, courthouses and farmhouses into versions of Greek temples. It spread through the United States between about 1820 and 1860, and through Britain in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars. This guide covers the dates, a street checklist for a Greek Revival house, the three Greek orders, key buildings on both sides of the Atlantic, and how the style differs from Georgian, Federal and Neoclassical work.

What is Greek Revival architecture?

It is a revival of the architecture of ancient Greece, built from accurate drawings of real Greek buildings. The Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission (PHMC) separates it from the earlier Georgian and Federal styles: those borrowed classical details, while Greek Revival tried to recreate the look of the ancient buildings themselves, above all the temple with its front pediment and row of columns.

The National Park Service puts it more plainly. In the 1830s through the 1860s, American builders turned banks, offices, churches and mansions “into little Greek temples,” with boxy rectangular bodies, strongly marked triangular gables, and porches carried on columns. On small houses and farmhouses they used fewer columns, or none, but kept the triangle of the gable end facing the front.

Architectural historian James Stevens Curl, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, treats Greek Revival as one part of the wider Neoclassical movement. It was used widely in the United States, the British Isles, Prussia and Bavaria. For the style’s place in the longer story, see our guide to types of architecture.

When was Greek Revival architecture popular?

The dates depend on the country and on the source. The style started earlier in Britain, where the measured drawings of Athens were published, and took hold in the United States a little later, where it was embraced as a new national style.

The PHMC gives three reasons for the American turn from Roman to Greek models around 1820. People sympathized with the Greeks fighting for independence. Archaeology was presenting Greece as the earliest democracy. And after the War of 1812, Roman-inspired building was associated with England, so Greek forms offered a new national style.

In Britain the style faded sooner. The Victorian Web, citing the historian Reginald Turnor, notes that the early deaths of Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1847) and George Basevi cost Neoclassicism two of its finest designers and left the field open to the Gothic Revival.

What are the characteristics of a Greek Revival house?

Pennsylvania’s field guide describes the typical house as having a front-facing gable, sometimes with a return, and a front entry with a flat entablature and pilasters or a small repeated pediment. Most have broad cornices, some with small windows at the frieze or attic level. The NPS adds the boxy shape, gable end returns, and plain, flat window frames. A Mississippi preservation guide, drawing on Lloyd Vogt’s New Orleans Houses, adds the paneled door with sidelights and a rectangular transom, the low-pitched roof, and openings that are always flat-topped, because Greek temples did not use arches.

Greek Revival house checklist

No single feature proves the style. The more of these a house shows, the stronger the case.

1. Gable end facing the street, treated as a pediment. On small houses with a side wing, the NPS notes, builders still stressed the triangle of the front gable (NPS, PHMC).
2. Gable returns or a full pediment: the cornice turns the corner and runs in along the base of the gable (NPS, PHMC).
3. A broad cornice and frieze band under the eaves, part of a full classical entablature (PHMC; Hancock County Historical Society).
4. Small frieze or attic windows set into that band (PHMC).
5. Pilasters at the front corners in place of Georgian quoins (PHMC).
6. A columned porch or portico, from a one-bay entry up to full-height columns across the front. Columns may be round with classical capitals or square paneled posts (PHMC).
7. A door framed by sidelights and a rectangular transom, with pilasters and a flat cornice above. A curved fanlight points instead to Federal (Hancock County Historical Society; PHMC).
8. Flat-topped windows and doors in plain, heavy surrounds. No arches (Hancock County Historical Society).
9. A low-pitched roof. Our roof pitch guide explains how to measure it from the street.

The PHMC lists houses, schools, churches, banks, commercial buildings and government offices as common building types. It notes that the full temple form, with massive columns across the whole front, is mostly found on mansions and public buildings. For how this fits among other American house styles, see our house styles guide.

What are the three Greek orders?

An order is a column together with the beam structure it carries. The University of Illinois guide to its campus lists three Greek orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) and two Roman additions (Tuscan and Composite). Each has a column made of base, shaft and capital, and an entablature made of architrave, frieze and cornice. The capital is the quickest way to tell them apart.

Proportions are given as column height in lower diameters. They varied between buildings and between authors, so the table gives two well-known systems: the Roman writer Vitruvius, and the 16th-century Italian architect Vignola as summarized by the University of Illinois.

Sources: Vitruvius, Book IV (LacusCurtius); University of Illinois. In the Doric frieze, grooved blocks called triglyphs alternate with panels called metopes. Vitruvius traces the triglyph to the ends of timber beams in early wooden temples, and the Corinthian capital to an acanthus plant growing around a basket left on a tomb. In Vignola’s system the entablature is one-quarter of the column height.

Famous Greek Revival buildings in the United States

Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia (1819–1824). Designed by William Strickland, it is the textbook American example. The NPS says Strickland took the Parthenon as his model, borrowing its blank pediments and Doric columns. After the bank closed in 1836 the building became Philadelphia’s Custom House. Today it is the portrait gallery of Independence National Historical Park, on Chestnut Street between 4th and 5th streets.

Arlington House, Arlington, Virginia (north wing 1802, south wing 1804, then the central block with its portico). The NPS says the back of the house was left as bare brick until 1818. It calls it one of the earliest Greek Revival structures and one of the earliest houses to use a colossal order, with columns running the full two stories. The plan is attributed to George Hadfield, an English architect who had worked on the US Capitol. The portico is 60 ft (18.3 m) wide and 25 ft (7.6 m) deep, with eight Doric columns, six of them across the front. Each column is 23 ft (7.0 m) tall and 5 ft (1.5 m) across at the bottom. The whole front, wings included, runs 140 ft (42.7 m).

Those figures give a column only about 4.6 diameters tall, much stockier than even Vitruvius’s earliest Doric rule of six. The columns are also smooth rather than fluted, which the NPS suggests was probably to save money. The capitals, entablature and pediments are wood covered in scored stucco, and the brick walls are coated in hydraulic cement painted to look like marble and sandstone. The NPS also records that the house was built by enslaved people.

Presidio and Fort Mason, San Francisco (Civil War era). The NPS describes the Army’s wood-frame Greek Revival barracks and officers’ houses here as simple, functional and inexpensive to build. The Funston Avenue officers’ housing and the Graham Street barracks at the Presidio both date from 1862. Their Greek Revival marks are front-facing gables, gable end returns, multi-pane double-hung windows and flat, simple frames. They show the style at its most stripped-down: no columns, just the temple shape.

Greek Revival in Britain

Curl’s dictionary names Hamilton, Hansen, von Klenze, Playfair, Schinkel, Smirke, Strickland, Thomson and Wilkins as the style’s most accomplished practitioners. Three of them appear in this guide: Strickland in Philadelphia, Smirke in London and Playfair in Edinburgh.

British Museum, London (1823–1847). The Victorian Web dates Sir Robert Smirke’s building to 1823–1847. The Antigone journal adds that plans were drawn up in 1821, that the south front, the main entrance, dates from the 1840s, and that work went on until 1852. It notes that the Ionic colonnade closely follows the columns of a Greek temple at Priene, and that Smirke, unlike his teachers George Dance the younger and John Soane, had managed to visit Greece. His younger brother Sydney took over after 1846.

National Monument, Calton Hill, Edinburgh (built 1826–1829). Historic Environment Scotland’s listing credits C. R. Cockerell and William Henry Playfair, with the design worked out in 1823–1826. It was meant as a copy of the Parthenon honoring Scottish servicemen killed in the Napoleonic Wars. The foundation ceremony was held in 1822, but the money ran out in 1829, leaving only the west portico: a Greek Doric colonnade of eight columns with two return columns on each side, twelve in all, in Craigleith stone.

Historic Environment Scotland calls the monument a cornerstone of Edinburgh’s reputation as the “Athens of the North.” It explains that Edinburgh came to see itself as Athens to London’s Rome, an idea strengthened by the Scottish Enlightenment and by the city’s wide use of Greek Revival architecture in the early 19th century. Edinburgh World Heritage describes Calton Hill as the city’s Acropolis.

St George’s Hall, Liverpool (1841–1854). Harvey Lonsdale Elmes won the competition in his mid-twenties, from 75 entries, then won a second competition for new assize courts, and the two schemes were merged. Elmes died of consumption in 1847, and the Victorian Web credits the finished building to Elmes and C. R. Cockerell. Its columns are Corinthian. The Victorian Web also notes that James Stevens Curl considers it perhaps the finest Neoclassical public building in England. For more landmarks of every period, see our famous buildings guide.

Greek Revival vs Federal vs Georgian vs Neoclassical

These four styles share columns, pediments and symmetry, which is why they get confused. The roof direction and the doorway are usually the fastest way to tell them apart.

Sources: PHMC Georgian, Federal and Early Classical Revival pages; Hancock County Historical Society.

“Neoclassical” is the umbrella term. EBSCO notes that the word was coined in the late 19th century for the classical revival that ran from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century, and that early Neoclassicism leaned on Roman models known from Herculaneum and Pompeii. Stuart and Revett’s measured drawings of Athens opened a long argument over whether Greece or Rome was the purer source. Greek Revival is the side that chose Greece. For the style that came first, read our Georgian architecture guide.