Greek Revival Architecture - Influence

Influence

With the rise of architectural historicism in the mid-19th century it is no longer possible to speak of a Greek revival movement, where the Doric is employed it is as another self-consciously anachronising style. The San Francisco Mint (completed 1874) is a case in point. Yet Greek culture and Greek design motifs continued to exert a powerful hold on late Victorian imagination and beyond. Peter Behrens's Haus Wiegund (1911–12), for example, echos the austere classicism of Gilly and Schinkel. Further north we find a resurgent interest in rationalism dressed in the neoclassical style; Nordic Classicism. If the idiom has fallen out of favour since World War II it is thanks to its association, rightly or wrongly, with the pastiche classicism of Albert Speer which still provokes controversy as witnessed in Léon Krier's provocative essay "Krier on Speer".

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