Revivalism and Architecture

This book is an original and focused academic examination of revivalism in architecture. It looks at how the past has and continues to shape our built environment and visual culture.

With contributions by leading scholars and emerging names across the disciplines of architecture, architectural history, history, and design, Revivalism and Architecture explains and challenges our understanding of the past’s impact - at times overt and at others nuanced and covert - upon later generations and geographic regions. There is no defined way to interpret revivalist works, including terminology (‘revival’, ‘modern’, and ‘neo-’), and there is an easy tendency to consider revivalist works as derivative pastiche. This volume questions some lingering prejudice against certain revived styles such as the Victorian Tudor revival, and it evaluates revivalist works according to their own time and merit rather than against their sources. By doing so, this book offers new light on the various, sometimes complicated ways in which the past has impacted, and continues to impact later periods. Contributors examine overt revivalism, the dissemination of revivalist forms, ideas, and styles, and covert revivalism, here termed ‘academic revivalism’. They address how ‘the other’ was revived, as well as the significance of surface pattern to revivalism, and the socio-economic, political, and artistic forces driving, inspiring, and governing revivalist practices.

The essays within Revivalism offer innovative research-based studies across architecture and applied design. They underline and enhance the awareness of revivalism’s broader context and utility, and thereby drive scholarship forwards in the ways in which revivalism is conceived and written about. The book also makes an innovative and lasting contribution to the field by underlining the relevance of studying the past to inform today’s students in art, architecture, and design schools.