Architectural style

Prior to the era of Enlightenment, the architectural form was mostly considered timeless, either as a divine revelation or an absolute truth derived from the laws of nature, and a great architect was the one who understood this "language".

The lesser objects in this approach do not deserve attention: "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture" (Nikolaus Pevsner, 1943).

[10] Nonetheless, the traditional and popular approach to the architectural history is through chronology of styles,[11] with changes reflecting the evolution of materials, economics, fashions, and beliefs.

Important writers on the broad theory of style including Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Gottfried Semper, and Alois Riegl in his Stilfragen of 1893, with Heinrich Wölfflin and Paul Frankl continued the debate into the 20th century.

[15] Paul Jacobsthal and Josef Strzygowski are among the art historians who followed Riegl in proposing grand schemes tracing the transmission of elements of styles across great ranges in time and space.

The subject of study no longer was the ideas that Borromini borrowed from Maderno who in turn learned from Michelangelo, instead the questions now were about the continuity and changes observed when the architecture transitioned from Renaissance to Baroque.

Terms originated to describe architectural periods were often subsequently applied to other areas of the visual arts, and then more widely still to music, literature and the general culture.

[17] In architecture stylistic change often follows, and is made possible by, the discovery of new techniques or materials, from the Gothic rib vault to modern metal and reinforced concrete construction.

A major area of debate in both art history and archaeology has been the extent to which stylistic change in other fields like painting or pottery is also a response to new technical possibilities, or has its own impetus to develop (the kunstwollen of Riegl), or changes in response to social and economic factors affecting patronage and the conditions of the artist, as current thinking tends to emphasize, using less rigid versions of Marxist art history.