Architecture

Under Architecture we cover the built environment of the European traditions — the Roman engineering of aqueduct, basilica, and bridge; the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals of the medieval West; the Byzantine and Orthodox church traditions; the Renaissance and Baroque palaces and piazze; the vernacular village traditions of the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coasts, and the Eastern European steppes; the urban and industrial architecture of the nineteenth century; and the contemporary work being done by European architects today.

We treat buildings as the most durable cultural artefact a society produces. They outlast the people who commissioned them, the regimes that paid for them, and often the religions that consecrated them. Reading a building well — its materials, its proportions, its sequence of spaces — is a way of reading the culture that produced it.