Types of architecture: a timeline of 17 styles, from the Pantheon to net-positive offices

People who search for “types of architecture” almost always want a list of architectural styles: what Gothic looks like, when Art Deco happened, how Brutalism differs from Modernism. This guide gives you that list as a single dated timeline of 17 Western styles, each with its defining features and one real example building, dated from its owner’s records or another official source. It also explains the narrower meaning of “type,” because the two words are not quite interchangeable.

What is the difference between types of architecture and architectural styles?

A building type describes what a building is for. A style describes how it looks and how it was built: the shape of its arches, its ornament, its materials and its proportions.

The two cut across each other. A cathedral is a type, and cathedrals have been built in Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque and modern styles. A Greek Revival bank and a Greek Revival farmhouse share a style but are different types. When you see a list titled “types of architecture” online, it is nearly always a list of styles, so most of this article follows that usage.

What are the main types of architecture by function?

The Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) sorts single buildings by function into dozens of groups, among them residential, religious, commercial, industrial, institutional, public and transportation structures. For everyday use, these six broad groups cover most buildings you will meet:

• Residential: detached houses, row houses, apartment buildings. Our guide to house styles covers the domestic side in detail.
• Religious: churches, cathedrals, mosques, synagogues, temples, monasteries.
• Civic and institutional: city halls, courthouses, libraries, museums, schools, hospitals.
• Commercial: offices, banks, shops, hotels, restaurants and diners.
• Industrial: factories, warehouses, mills, power stations.
• Transportation and infrastructure: stations, bridges, airports.

Style decides how each of these looks. The rest of this guide is about style.

Architectural styles timeline: dates, features and examples

The dates for each style come from the AAT, the Getty Research Institute’s reference vocabulary for art and architecture, except where noted. Styles overlap, start at different times in different countries, and revivals can run for decades after the original, so treat each date range as the period when the style was at its height.

Four of these examples, the Pantheon, the Empire State Building, Villa Savoye and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, also appear in our list of famous buildings.

How do you identify an architectural style?

Start with the openings. The shape of an arch or window head is one of the quickest clues to date, because different eras shaped the top of an opening in different ways.

Then work through this street checklist:

1. Arches. Semicircular and heavy suggests Romanesque or a Romanesque revival. Pointed suggests Gothic or Gothic Revival. Long horizontal bands of glass with no arch at all point to 20th-century Modernism.
2. Columns. Plain Doric columns under a blank pediment usually mean Greek Revival in the United States. Richer Corinthian columns, paired columns and heavy sculpture suggest Baroque or Beaux-Arts.
3. Ornament. Plant-like curves in iron and glass mean Art Nouveau. Zigzags, geometric motifs and stepped outlines suggest Art Deco. No ornament at all points to Modernism.
4. Material left on show. Raw, exposed concrete points to Brutalism. Exposed steel frames and colored ducts point to High-Tech.
5. Shape of the whole. A symmetrical, centered facade is Classical in origin. Deliberately tilted, broken or curving volumes belong to Deconstructivism.
6. Historical jokes. Classical elements used playfully or whimsically are a Postmodern signature.

Ancient and medieval styles: Classical, Romanesque and Gothic

Classical Greek and Roman

The AAT dates ancient Greek culture and style from about 900 BCE to 31 BCE. A University of Illinois guide to the orders notes that tradition recognizes three Greek column orders, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, and that the Romans adopted all three and created two more, the Tuscan and the Composite. Rome also built on a huge scale in concrete. The Pantheon in Rome shows both sides of that inheritance: a temple portico in front and a dome that, its official site says, is made entirely of concrete. The same site says Agrippa built the first temple on the site, and that the present building is traditionally attributed to Hadrian’s reconstruction between 118 and 125 AD.

Almost every later “classical” style in this list, from the Renaissance to Beaux-Arts, borrows from this vocabulary.

Romanesque

The AAT places Romanesque in the 11th and 12th centuries in western Europe, during the growth of towns and the rebuilding of monasteries. It describes the style through Roman influence, great size, round arches and masonry vaults. In England the style is usually called Norman, one of the period names the antiquarian Thomas Rickman proposed in the early 1800s. Durham Cathedral, built between 1093 and 1133, is one of the largest and least altered Norman buildings in England, according to the cathedral, and its innovative architecture is one of the reasons it is on the World Heritage List.

Gothic

Gothic began in northern France in the mid-12th century and spread across western Europe over the next 100 years, the AAT says. It credits pointed arches and flying buttresses with the style’s soaring height, and lists towers, spires and stained glass among its marks. England’s first Gothic phase is called Early English, which the AAT describes by its pointed arches and long, narrow windows without mullions. Salisbury Cathedral, which a University of Oxford course pairs with Lincoln as showing the switch to Early English Gothic in the 1200s, shows how quickly a Gothic cathedral could rise. Its foundation stones were laid on April 28, 1220, the east end was finished in 1225 and the cathedral was consecrated in 1258. The cathedral notes that its foundations are only 1.2 m (4 ft) deep.

From Renaissance to Neoclassical

Renaissance

The Renaissance began in Italy in the late 14th century and peaked in the 16th, deliberately reviving the architecture and ideals of ancient Rome and Greece (AAT). Villa La Rotonda outside Vicenza is a late example. Paolo Almerico commissioned Andrea Palladio in 1565, and after Palladio’s death in 1580 his pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi took over the work. The villa’s own site calls it a villa-temple: columned porches on all four sides recall a pagan temple, and a domed hall sits at the center. Palladio’s ideas returned in Britain as Palladianism, which the Georgian Group describes as a revival of proportion, symmetry and the correct use of the Classical orders, popular from 1714 to about 1760; see our guide to Georgian architecture.

Baroque

The AAT dates Baroque to about 1590–1750 and describes a taste for spectacle and emotion, with contrasts of light against dark and mass against void, and strong diagonals and curves. Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral in London, which the Georgian Group lists among England’s famous Baroque buildings, shows how the style reached England. Work on the foundations began in June 1675, and the covering of the outer dome was finished in 1710. The cathedral’s own drawing archive records that Wren’s dome was inspired by Michelangelo’s St Peter’s in Rome and Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s Invalides church in Paris. In 1703–04 he also revised the lanterns of the west towers to give them a more Baroque form than the plainer outer dome.

Neoclassical

Neoclassicism ran from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. It was prompted by archaeological discoveries around the Mediterranean and was partly a reaction against Rococo excess. The AAT describes its buildings as often linear, symmetrical and even severe. The Panthéon in Paris is an early landmark: the Centre des monuments nationaux says its portico crowned by a dome became a Neoclassical archetype. Its first stone was laid on September 6, 1764, to designs by Jacques-Germain Soufflot. He died before it was finished, and his collaborator Maximilien Brébion and his student Jean-Baptiste Rondelet completed it in 1790.

The 19th-century revivals: Greek, Gothic and Beaux-Arts

Greek Revival

Greek Revival, which the AAT dates from the 1750s to about 1840, tried to copy ancient Greek buildings accurately rather than loosely. In the United States, the National Park Service says, it was popular from the 1830s through the 1860s, when builders turned banks, offices, churches and mansions into small Greek temples. The Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, designed by William Strickland and built between 1819 and 1824, is the textbook case. The National Park Service notes that Strickland took the Parthenon as his model, borrowing its blank pediments and Doric columns. Our full guide to Greek Revival covers the American house version.

Gothic Revival

Gothic Revival brought back pinnacles, tracery, foils, rosettes and colorful effects. The AAT says it was most important in the United States and England from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. In England it started early and privately. The story of Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, near London, begins in 1747, when Horace Walpole bought the site and began turning a couple of cottages into a small Gothic castle. In the United States, Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York, was designed in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis; the house calls itself the oldest Gothic Revival residence in America.

Beaux-Arts

Beaux-Arts takes its name from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The AAT notes that the style was taught there and at other schools in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. The AAT describes harmonious Classical compositions, a revival of Baroque and Neoclassical forms, and cities laid out geometrically with wide, grand streets. The New York Public Library’s main building on Fifth Avenue, designed by Carrère and Hastings, was begun in 1898 and completed in 1911. New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission calls the marble building one of the masterpieces of the Beaux-Arts style.

From 1890 to 1940: Art Nouveau and Art Deco

Art Nouveau

The AAT dates Art Nouveau to about 1890–1910, and the V&A runs it from the early 1890s to the First World War. Its signature is the fluid, undulating line taken from plants, worked in modern materials such as iron and glass. The style took different names in different countries. In Spain, the V&A says, it was part of the Modernista movement, whose leading architect was Antoni Gaudí. His Casa Batlló in Barcelona (1904–1906) is described by the house itself as one of the foremost examples of the movement. Our Art Nouveau architecture guide covers the regional variants.

Art Deco

Art Deco spread through Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s and became popular after the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris (AAT). The V&A points out that the name came later: at the time of the 1925 exhibition the style was known as “Style Moderne,” and the term Art Deco was coined in the 1960s. British and American critics also called it “Zigzag Moderne.” Look for stepped silhouettes, zigzags, geometric ornament and rich materials. The Empire State Building in New York, designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, went up between March 17, 1930, and May 1, 1931, and its owners describe it as a 102-story Art Deco skyscraper.

Modern and after: from the International Style to sustainable design

Modernism and the International Style

Modernism is the umbrella term for the 20th-century avant-garde movements. The International Style is one of its main architectural branches. According to the AAT, it emerged in the Netherlands, France and Germany after World War I and remained the dominant style until the 1970s. It favored volume over mass, lightweight industrial materials, no ornament or color, and flat surfaces alternating with glass. Villa Savoye in Poissy, near Paris, which the Centre des monuments nationaux calls an icon of the Modern Movement, is a classic case. Pierre and Eugénie Savoye commissioned it from Le Corbusier, working with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, in 1928, and the Fondation Le Corbusier dates the house 1928–1931. The finished house had a flat roof with a solarium, an open plan and a huge sliding glass window.

Modernism had many regional and commercial branches. In the United States these include domestic mid-century modern houses and the roadside, Space Age exuberance of Googie architecture. Japan developed its own version, covered in our guide to modern Japanese architecture.

Brutalism

The name comes from the French béton brut, “raw concrete.” The AAT ties the style to the 1960s and 1970s and to Le Corbusier’s late concrete work. London’s Barbican, which the Barbican Centre calls an icon of Brutalist architecture, is a major example. Construction on the estate, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, began in 1965 and took 11 years, according to the City of London. The 16-hectare (40-acre) estate now has more than 2,060 flats and was Grade II-listed in September 2001.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism developed from the 1960s as a challenge to Modernism and came into wide architectural use in the 1970s, the AAT says. It argued that Modernism had failed to communicate with ordinary viewers, and it answered with selective historicism and playful Classical elements. Michael Graves’s Portland Building in Portland, Oregon, built in 1982 as city offices, is described by the city as an award-winning example of postmodern architecture.

High-Tech

High-Tech was popular in Europe and North America in the 1970s. It used sleek lines, new materials and prefabricated parts to test the limits of technology (AAT), often by putting structure and services on the outside. The Centre Pompidou, by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, has stood in central Paris since 1977, and Dezeen’s series on high-tech architecture features it as a landmark of the style. It is a glass and metal building whose technical installations and piping run outside in bright primary colors, leaving every floor open inside.

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism borrowed its name from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and reached architecture in the 1980s, according to the AAT, which describes a purposeful displacement of structural elements. In practice that can mean tilted walls, broken volumes and surfaces that seem to slide past each other. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, designed by Frank Gehry and dated 1991–97 by the museum, is described by the museum as a large sculpture of titanium, limestone and glass. Gehry does not call himself a deconstructivist, Dezeen notes, but the building’s fragmented, non-rectilinear volumes made it emblematic of the movement.

Contemporary sustainable architecture

There is no settled name yet for the architecture of the last two decades, so “contemporary sustainable” is our own grouping. What unites the work is performance: buildings that produce their own energy, collect their own water and avoid toxic materials. The six-story Bullitt Center in Seattle, designed by the Miller Hull Partnership, opened on Earth Day 2013. Over its first decade it generated nearly 30 percent more energy from its rooftop solar panels than it used, according to the building’s operators.

How do architectural styles relate to one another?

Read the timeline as a series of swings between two ideas. One is the Classical idea of fixed rules and proportions: Greek and Roman, Renaissance, Neoclassical, Greek Revival and Beaux-Arts. The other favors expression, structure or novelty: Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau, Modernism and Deconstructivism.

Revivals keep the cycle going. The 18th and 19th centuries revived Greek and Gothic architecture, and Beaux-Arts revived Baroque and Neoclassical forms. Postmodernism then brought Classical elements back in the 1970s as a challenge to Modernism. That is why the date on a building’s cornerstone and the date of its style often disagree, and why the arch, window and ornament clues above are more reliable than a guess at age.