Historicism

Historicism.
1. Architecture strongly influenced by the past, especially Revivalist architecture (Greek, Gothic, Early Christian, Romanesque, Italianate, Renaissance, the various Henri and Louis styles, Rundbogenstil, Elizabethan, Jacobethan, Tudor, and other Revivals).

2. Term used to describe a tendency among some architects to insist their work was part of a continuous process of cultural evolution that was capable of historical analysis. Revivals were facilitated by the many lavish and scholarly publications, notably those based on archaeology and meticulous measured drawings that were such a feature of the late C18 and C19, collections of architectural casts and details, and the desire to enter into the essence of a style or styles. Virtually all the way through C19, concerns to find a style appropriate to the time (and for the many new and unprecedented building-types) were voiced (notably by Hübsch), and by the time Shaw, Webb, and others were working in the 1870s a theory evolved that, by mixing styles in a free, eclectic way, some kind of new style would emerge from the mélange. Although conventional wisdom holds that the so-called Queen Anne and Free styles were relatively free from Historicism, such a view is demonstrably false, while Art Nouveau, supposedly a reaction against historical revivals, was too firmly embedded in late Gothic and Celtic Revivals, and even (obviously) in Rococo, to be regarded as such, in spite of the claims of its protagonists and its later apologists. The International Modernists' rejection of all history (and, supposedly, of all styles (save their own) ) in turn created in C20 reactions, where certain architects, perceiving that a serious disruption had taken place, attempted to consider the nature of their own relationship with history, and to rebuild bridges to a great cultural past that had been dismissed as irrelevant.

Bibliography

AHR, lix (1954), 568–77; (1987);
Crook (1987);
Döhmer (1976);
Herrmann (1992);
Pevsner (1960, 1968);
Streich (1984);
Jane Turner (1996);
D. Watkin (1977)