Architectural sculpture

Modern understanding of ancient Egyptian architecture is based mainly on the religious monuments that have survived since antiquity, which are carved stone with post and lintel construction.

The Fertile Crescent architectural sculptural tradition began when Ashurnasirpal II moved his capitol to the city of Nimrud around 879 BCE.

This fairly easy to cut stone could be quarried in large blocks that allowed them to be easily carved for the palaces that were built there.

This remained a feature of later Greek and Roman temples and was revived in the Renaissance, with many new examples, by then mostly on large public buildings, created in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Greek examples of architectural sculpture are distinguished not only by their age but their very high quality and skilful technique, with rhythmic and dynamic modelling, figural compositions in friezes that continue seamlessly over vertical joints from one block of stone to the next, and mastery of depth and legibility.

The Philadelphia City Hall, constructed 1871 through 1901, is recognized as the turning point,[3] because of the approximately 250 sculptures planned for the building, the large finial of William Penn, and the practical effect of Alexander Milne Calder training many assistants there.

The Beaux-Arts style dominated for major public buildings between the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, through about 1912, the year of the San Francisco City Hall.

As of the 2010s there are isolated signs of a revival of interest, for instance in the career of Raymond Kaskey and the Persist statue in Sacramento, California.