What style is that great building? What buildings are beautiful? Join us for a photo tour through architectural history. In this photo gallery you will find buildings and structures that illustrate important periods and styles from prehistoric days through modern times. For more historic periods, also see our Architecture Timeline.
Monoliths, Mounds, and Prehistoric Structures
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3,050 BC-900 BC: Ancient Egypt
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850 BC-476 AD: Classical
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527 AD-565 AD: Byzantine
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800 AD - 1200 AD: Romanesque
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1100-1450: Gothic
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1400-1600: Renaissance
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1600-1830: Baroque
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1650-1790: Rococo
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1730-1925: Neoclassicism
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1890 to 1914: Art Nouveau
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1885-1925: Beaux Arts
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1905-1930: Neo-Gothic
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1925-1937: Art Deco
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1900-Present: Modernist Styles
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1972-Present: Postmodernism
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21st Century
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What qualities do you think make a building beautiful? Graceful lines? Simple form? Functionality? Here are some ideas from architecture enthusiasts around the world:
- All great architecture has balance and symmetry. That's why classical architecture - Greek, Roman - has endured through the ages.
- I think the most beautiful buildings are the ones that surprise us. They break all the rules. That's why I like Frank Gehry so much.
- The appearance of a building or its elevational geometric(s) should certainly be the result of the building's functionality. Simply put, it is form deriving from function that equals to aesthetics. The form therefore should be of pure geometry without frills, giving interpretation to all horizontal angulations offered by the plan. There should be no arbitrary interpretation from the horizontal plane to its true orthographical projection directly to its regular verticality. The Designer must relay a clear isometric clarity by crystallographic simplicity accountable to its structural determinants.
- A beautiful space must satisfy the purpose, place, period, and people for whom it is designed.
- A building is beautiful, I suppose, When it's sculpted like a rock, Yet unfolds like a rose.
- To me, the beauty of a building is its functionality. Then I can relate with it perfectly, I can speak to it and it will respond, I can rest in after a hard day's job and I will be soothed. Especially, in Lagos, Nigeria where traffic is always is locked. In the Third World, it's not always about the flowery landscape. Oftentimes, it's about a space to lay your head with plenty of fresh air with two eyes closed.
- What makes a building beautiful? Balance, proportion, appropriate embellishments, congruity with its environment and evidence of human skill.
- The town of Bath in England is uniformly beautiful because of the symmetry of design and colour of its primary buildings. A soft yellow sedimentary stone, called Bath stone, has been used to face all the buildings built there since the mid-1700s. When you approach the city from the east, you look down into a large bowl-shaped valley that seems to be full of pale honey. The Bath Crescent, an immense arc of Georgian townhouses, to me is the most beautiful building in the world.
- Great architecture is when entering or viewing a building, I feel great. HAGIA SOFIA MAKES ME ECSTATIC, I am knocked out by 12th and 13th century French gothic cathedrals, seeing the Taj is breathtaking. Wright's home in Oak Park is very exciting, the light and color in Legoretta's are wonderful, St. Mark's Square in Venice is unforgettable, Palladio and Aalto's buildings are exciting. These are just a few examples.
- Beauty comes when it tries to please all our senses.