Ben Henderson History

Why do many of Britain’s great buildings look like Greek temples?

In the 5th century BC, the Greeks forged a classical style - symmetry, columns, pediments - seen at the Parthenon. It mirrored a worldview of rational order and mathematical proportion.

Rome then adopted Greek culture but built on a grander, more imperial scale. Their concrete enabled vast arches and domes - think the Pantheon.

After the Western Empire fell, much classical theory in the Latin West faded from view. The spark returned when Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered the Roman architect Vitruvius in 1414, giving Renaissance designers a rulebook for beauty and structure.

Vitruvius shaped Palladio, whose ideas reached England through Inigo Jones. Jones’s Queen’s House (1616) is often called England’s first truly classical/Palladian building.

After the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren rebuilt London in a restrained English Baroque that fused classical geometry with contemporary drama - culminating in St Paul’s Cathedral (begun 1675).

By the early 1700s, as Parliament’s power rose, Britain turned from showy Baroque to rule-bound Palladianism. Chiswick House (1729) is a prime example.

Enlightenment thinking, plus the excavations in Greece and Pompeii (1748), ignited Neoclassicism. Britain cast itself as a “new Rome,” from the British Museum’s Greek Revival colonnade to Georgian cityscapes in Bath and Edinburgh, and exported the look across the empire.

That’s why so many British buildings feature the classical hallmarks laid out by the Greeks thousands of years ago.

#history #architecture #britishhistory #britisharchitecture #classicalarchitecture

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