Romanesque Architecture - Romanesque Revival

Romanesque Revival

During the 19th century, when Gothic Revival architecture was fashionable, buildings were occasionally designed in the Romanesque style. There are a number of Romanesque Revival churches, dating from as early as the 1830s and continuing into the 20th century where the massive and "brutal" quality of the Romanesque style was appreciated and designed in brick.

The Natural History Museum, London designed by Alfred Waterhouse, 1879, on the other hand, is a Romanesque revival building that makes full use of the decorative potential of Romanesque arcading and architectural sculpture. The Romanesque appearance has been achieved while freely adapting an overall style to suit the function of the building. The columns of the foyer, for example, give an impression of incised geometric design similar to those of Durham Cathedral. However, the sources of the incised patterns are the trunks of palms, cycads and tropical tree ferns. The animal motifs, of which there are many, include rare and exotic species.

The type of modern buildings for which the Romanesque style was most frequently adapted was the warehouse, where a lack of large windows and an appearance of great strength and stability were desirable features. These buildings, generally of brick, frequently have flattened buttresses rising to wide arches at the upper levels after the manner of some Italian Romanesque facades. This style was adapted to suit commercial buildings by opening the spaces between the arches into large windows, the brick walls becoming a shell to a building that was essentially of modern steel-frame construction, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson giving his name to the style, Richardsonian Romanesque. Good examples of the style are Marshall Field's Wholesale Store, Chicago by H.H. Richardson, 1885, and the Chadwick Lead Works in Boston USA by William Preston, 1887. The style also lent itself to the building of cloth mills, steelworks and powerstations.

The 19th century reconstruction of the westwerk of the Romanesque Speyer Cathedral. Royce Hall, at UCLA, inspired by The Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, Italy. Stanford Memorial Church at Stanford University, US, is a loose interpretation of a Romanesque facade.