Architecture Styles Guide: How to Recognise Buildings in a City

You can recognise most architectural styles by checking a handful of details: the shape of the arches, whether there are columns, how much ornament there is and what it looks like, the size and rhythm of the windows, and the main material. Learn those five clues and an ordinary street starts to read like a timeline.

One warning before we start. Many buildings are revivals, built centuries after the style they copy, and plenty mix several styles at once. Treat what follows as a field guide, not a rulebook.

#Why do styles look the way they do?

Style is partly fashion and partly engineering. Before steel frames, a wall had to carry the weight of everything above it, so walls were thick and windows were limited. Each new way of spreading that load, from the pointed arch to the flying buttress to the steel skeleton, opened up new shapes. When you spot a style, it helps to ask what problem the builders were solving, as well as what look they were after.

#The quick-reference table

The dates are loose, and they vary a lot from country to country.

#Columns: the first thing to check

If a building has columns, look at the top of them, the capital. The three classical orders are easy to learn:

• Doric: a plain, cushion-like top. Sturdy and simple.
• Ionic: a pair of scroll shapes, like a rolled-up piece of paper at each side.
• Corinthian: a bushy cluster of carved acanthus leaves.

A triangular pediment above a row of columns is the signature of a Greek or Roman temple front. When you see one on a bank, museum, court or parliament building from the 18th or 19th century, you are almost certainly looking at Neoclassical architecture, which borrowed that look deliberately to suggest permanence and authority.

#Round arch or pointed arch?

This one clue separates two medieval styles that people often mix up.

Romanesque churches use round arches. The walls are thick, the windows fairly small, and the overall feel is solid and a little fortress-like.

Gothic uses the pointed arch, which directs weight more steeply downwards, together with ribbed vaults on the ceiling and, on many big churches, flying buttresses: stone arms outside the building that brace the walls. Because the walls no longer carried everything, they could be opened up for huge stained-glass windows. The style is usually traced to the abbey church of Saint-Denis near Paris in the 12th century.

Now the trap. London's Houses of Parliament look Gothic, but they were built in the 19th century as Gothic Revival. So were many churches, universities and railway stations of that period. Clues that a "Gothic" building is a revival: very crisp, regular stonework, machine-like repetition of detail, and a date or setting that does not fit the Middle Ages, such as a station.

#Renaissance and Baroque: calm versus drama

Renaissance architecture began in 15th-century Italy, with Florence as an early centre and Filippo Brunelleschi as one of its key figures. It brought back Classical columns and domes and cared about proportion and balance. A Renaissance façade tends to feel calm, flat and ordered.

Baroque, which grew out of it in 17th-century Rome, wants to move you. Façades curve in and out, columns cluster for effect, and interiors use light, gilding and painted ceilings for theatre. Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini are the names most associated with it. A simple test: if the front of the building seems to bulge, ripple or put on a show, think Baroque.

#Art Nouveau versus Art Deco

These two get confused constantly, partly because the names sound alike.

Art Nouveau (around 1890 to 1910) is about the curve. Stems, tendrils, whiplash lines, ironwork that looks like it grew there. Victor Horta's houses in Brussels and the entrances Hector Guimard designed for the Paris Métro are classic examples. In Barcelona the related local movement is Modernisme, which includes Antoni Gaudí.

Art Deco (1920s and 1930s) is about geometry. Zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts, stepped setbacks and strong vertical lines, often in stone, chrome or terracotta. New York's Chrysler Building is the famous one, and many cinemas and apartment blocks from the interwar years carry the look.

A memory hook: Nouveau grows, Deco is drawn with a ruler.

#Modernism, Brutalism and after

Modernism threw out applied ornament. The phrase "form follows function", associated with the American architect Louis Sullivan, became a slogan for the movement, and Le Corbusier set out his "five points" for a new architecture: raised supports, a free plan, a free façade, long horizontal windows and a roof garden. Look for flat roofs, smooth white or glass walls, and bands of windows that run along the façade. Steel and reinforced concrete frames made this possible, because the outer wall no longer had to hold the building up.

Brutalism took the modernist idea of honest materials and made it heavy. The name comes from the French béton brut, raw concrete. Expect board-marked concrete, deep window recesses and big repeated blocks. It is one of the most divisive styles: London's Barbican Estate has many admirers, and similar buildings elsewhere have been demolished as eyesores. Both reactions are fair.

Postmodernism, from roughly the 1970s, pushed back against modernist plainness with jokes and borrowings: a giant broken pediment on a skyscraper, a column in pastel colours. Much contemporary architecture since then is harder to label, and that is fine.

#How to practise on a real walk

Pick one street you already know. Walk it slowly and, for each building, ask only three questions: arches round or pointed, any columns and which kind, and is the ornament curvy, geometric or absent? Do not try to name every building. After a few walks, you will start to notice which styles your city has plenty of, which usually tells you when it grew fastest. That turns architecture into a way of reading history you can see.

Architecture is one of the subjects in the Topicly topic catalog, so you can follow it and get a short discovery at a time of day you choose. For something narrower, a custom topic such as "Teach me one architectural style a day with examples in European cities" works well, and Keep pulling this thread lets you follow a single idea, like flying buttresses, further. The articles are AI-written and labelled as possibly containing errors, so check a guidebook before you correct a tour guide.

This weekend, find one column capital near you and decide whether it is Doric, Ionic or Corinthian. Topicly is coming soon to iPhone and Android if you want the next style waiting for you each morning.