A journey through times and cultures? Ancient Greek forms in American nineteenth-century architecture: an archaeological view

Lambert Schneider

Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History

Abstract: The presence of classical architectural features in modern Western architecture shows that knowledge from ancient times was travelling through both space and time. Yet despite surface similarities, the architecture of revival was very different to that of antiquity. The classicistic architecture of nineteenth-century America provides a clear case. In contrast to the Roman influences that affected the founding fathers, nineteenth century American architecture borrowed instead from the Greeks. Informed less by archaeology and more by ideology, the American Greek revival saw the architectural forms divested of original meanings and invested with the ideals of postrevolutionary America. Looking at the vectors by which the revival reached American shores shows a double distortion affecting the transmission of the signal from Ancient Greece, such that what survives the great distances and times that separate the two societies is in the end a very different set of facts.

JEL-codes: L74 O51 O52 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2008-04
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/22507/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:wpaper:22507

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic History Working Papers from London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History LSE, Dept. of Economic History Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager on behalf of EH Dept. ().