Renaissance Revival Architecture - Legacy

Legacy

By the beginning of the 20th century Neo-Renaissance was a commonplace sight on the main streets of thousands of towns, large and small around, the world. In southern Europe the Neo-Renaissance style began to fall from favour circa 1900. However, it was still extensively practiced in the 1910s in Saint Petersburg and Buenos Aires by such architects as Leon Benois (picture), Marian Peretyatkovich (picture), or Francisco Tamburini (picture).

In England it was so common that today one finds "Renaissance Italian Palazzi" serving as banks or municipal buildings in the centres of even the smallest towns. It has been said "It is a well-known fact that the nineteenth century had no art style of its own." While to an extent this may be true, the same could be said of most eras until the early 20th century, the Neo-Renaissance in the hands of provincial architects did develop into a style not always instantly recognisable as a derivative of the Renaissance. In this less obvious guise the Neo-Renaissance was to provide an important undercurrent in totalitarian architecture of various countries, notably in Stalinist architecture of the Soviet Union, as seen in some pavilions of the All-Soviet Exhibition Centre.

Neo-Renaissance architecture, because of its diversity, is perhaps the only style of architecture to have existed in so many forms, yet still common to so many countries.