Renaissance Architecture

The Renaissance was the "new birth of learning" that arrived in Europe about fivehundred years ago. The Renaissance did not bring any new ideas in architecture, but it encouraged study of the classical styles of Greece and Rome, and this made architectural design better. modern architecture. Until fifty or seventy-five years ago, the only developments in architecture for hundreds of years had been in design. About two hundred years ago, Robert Adam designed the simple, plain-fronted city house that he first built in London, England, and that was copied in cities throughout Europe and America. In the same period was developed the American "colonial" house seen not only throughout New England but all over the country, and the "southern mansion with its high wooden pillars or columns.

Nearly all houses were the same in construction, with a strong foundation wall of stone or brick, beams (often the trunks of big trees) laid across these walls, and the house built on them. Space was found by building upward—always two or three stories, and often four or five stories. Great public buildings were decorated lavishly, in styles called baroque and rococo. Houses came to have frills and ornaments all over them, and tiny spires and domes wherever the architect could find place for them. We call these decorations "gingerbread" now, and do not think they are very pretty.

The real modern age in architecture began about seventy-five years ago. Two things made it possible: the strength of concrete reinforced with steel, with which giant skyscrapers could be built; and the elevator, which allowed the skyscraper to be used conveniently. With these developments, architects began to build the great skyscrapers, the office buildings and apartment houses and hotels, that we know today. They were still influenced by old ideas of design. The Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, is quite fancy. The big buildings of Rockefeller Center, by comparison, are very plain.

Even newer buildings—the United Nations and Lever Brothers buildings in New York, for instance—are straight-sided, boxlike forms on which most of the outer surface is glass, not stone or brick as in older buildings. Churches, too, have changed slowly in design. Nearly all of them have continued to follow the needs of older times, when high steeples were needed so that the townfolk could hear the bells ring. Today, with loudspeakers, the steeples are not needed, and modern architects recognize this. Some of the latest places of worship are low, graceful buildings far different from the severe ones of the past. The houses in which people live are changing in the same way. Whenever possible, the architect builds the entire house on one floor, so there will be no stairs to climb. The "ranch house," which has only one story and rambles all over the property, has become a rather popular design.