At the Origins of Western Architecture

Learning to read our monuments with an architectural historian

The French National Assembly and its Corinthian columns. Photo: Arthur Weidmann

Dear readers,

because a civilization is embodied in its monuments, I wanted to talk to you about classical Western architecture, which is the architectural style inspired by Greco-Roman antiquity and found in the cities of Europe and North America. This architecture has become an important element of Western identity: for example, in our collective imagination, a facade with a colonnade symbolizes an institutional building like a courthouse or a town hall.

I will base this paper on the work of John Summerson, a British historian and author of The Classical Language of Architecture, who describes the classical style as “the Latin of Western architecture.” This book, for example, taught me the origin of architectural elements we regularly encounter in Europe and its offsprings, such as the column.

The Origins of the Classical Style