The history of architecture
The history of architecture is the record of how the discipline of architecture has changed across roughly 4,000 years of building, from the first load bearing stone walls of Mesopotamia to the carbon counting of a modern building today. It is not a single line but a set of movements, each one a different answer to the same questions: how to span a space, how to keep it warm or cool, and how to make it mean something to the people inside. This page traces those movements in order, and names the buildings that mark each turn.
The ancient foundations
The ancient foundations of architecture are the first systems that could be repeated, and they set the vocabulary the discipline still uses. Greek architecture fixed the 3 classical orders, the Doric, the Ionic and the Corinthian, as named ways of combining a column and a capital. Roman architecture added concrete around 300 BC, and with it the unreinforced dome of the Pantheon in Rome, completed in 126, which still spans 43.3 metres without reinforcement. Egyptian architecture solved the problem of the heavy roof with the post and lintel, a system so simple that it is still the basic logic of a modern floor. These 3 traditions are the roots, and every later style is a variation on one of them.
The medieval and classical styles
The medieval and classical styles of architecture show how the discipline learned to build taller and to organize larger spaces. Gothic architecture in the 12th and 13th centuries pushed stone into the air with the pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress, and produced cathedrals such as the Chartres cathedral in France, whose nave rises 37 metres. The buttress is the key device, because it moves the load of the roof down and out to a wall that can be pierced with stained glass. Renaissance architecture in the 15th century, led by Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence, returned to the Roman round arch and to proportion, and set the standard for the palazzo that still shapes city centres. Brunelleschi's dome over the Florence cathedral, completed in 1436, spanned 42 metres without the centering that a medieval builder would have needed, a feat that was new even to the engineers of the day. Each of these styles answered the same problem, the height of the wall and the span of the roof, with a different structural trick, and the trick is what we remember as the style.
The industrial turn and the modern movement
The industrial turn and the modern movement in architecture changed what a building was made of, and with that, what it could look like. Steel and plate glass appeared in the 19th century, and the Crystal Palace of Joseph Paxton in London in 1851, a 92,000 square metre exhibition hall of iron and glass, showed that a large span no longer needed stone. The modern movement of the 20th century, with Le Corbusier in France and Frank Lloyd Wright in the United States, rejected ornament and treated the flat roof, the open plan and the ribbon window as the honest form of a building. Wright's Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, set over a waterfall in 1935, is the signature house of the American branch of the movement. The materials, not the plaster, decided the form, and that idea carried straight into the building information modeling of today.
The contemporary architecture of the digital age
The contemporary architecture of the digital age is architecture that is drawn in software before it is ever built, and it is the form that Frank Gehry pushed to its most visible point. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened on 18 October 1997, used curved titanium panels whose double curvature could not have been described on paper and was only solved with a computer model. Helsinki architecture in Finland, led by Alvar Aalto and continuing after him, took a different contemporary path, bending birch and brick into organic forms that fit the landscape. The difference between these two branches of contemporary architecture is a difference of tool: one follows the freedom of the computer, the other follows the warmth of the material, and both are modern architecture in the same way that a novel and a poem are both literature.
The history of architecture is, in the end, a history of the materials and the tools, because each new material and each new tool has unlocked a new form. Stone gave the order, concrete gave the dome, steel gave the span, and software gives the curve. The styles are the names we put on those unlocks, and the buildings that survive are the ones whose form was doing the work of the material.