In the architecture of the first half of the nineteenth century the neoclassical tendency was initially imposed, already present in the second half of the eighteenth century, but, concomitantly with the spreading of romantic sensitivity and the consequent interest in historicism, architectural tendencies soon appeared. the recovery of “styles” from previous eras (in particular the Middle Ages as the presumed cradle of national identities), characterized by the prefix “neo” (neo-Romanesque, neo-gothic, etc.), which are also defined by the term revivalism.

The nineteenth century is therefore characterized by a sort of code: historicist eclecticism, where all tastes can be simultaneously present in the overall work of the same designer or even in the same building. This at least until the end of the century of the Art Nouveau movement (also called Liberty), which was the first non-historicist and therefore modern (modernism) architectural movement.

Historical context
The nineteenth century was a century of great economic, social and political transformations. It was the century of Napoleon Bonaparte, of the Congress of Vienna, of the affirmation of new national identities, of the affirmation of liberalism, of capitalism, of international trade and of urban development, but also of the birth of the ideals of socialism. He witnessed the so-called Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary development of science and technology underlined by positivism.

In the literary and artistic fields dominated Romanticism in the first half of the century, while in the second half realism was affirmed and, in painting, Impressionism. Even the nineteenth century was the century of Marx, Freud, Malthus, Darwin.

Periodization
The common factor in which all the architectural and artistic speculation of the nineteenth century can be reduced is historicism, or the recovery of tradition, of the past in every field. In this sense it is possible to say that one of the characteristics of nineteenth-century architecture was not so much to conceive the new as to manipulate the pre-existent in a creative way. In light of this, a rigid periodization of styles is difficult, when architects like Karl Friedrich Schinkel engaged in designing and creating Neo-Greek, Neoroman, Neo-Gothic, Neo-Romanesque works, always reinterpreting motifs from the past.

From the historicist eclecticism, intended as an architectural characteristic of the nineteenth century, which is divided into a series of styles, each of which is characterized by its own invariants, some aspects of the most complex architectural culture should be distinguished in terms of temporal development.

Among these the same Neoclassicism, affirmed at the turn of the two centuries, a broader movement, from the subsequent historicism and of course the Art Nouveau that concludes not only the historicist period but the entire classicist evolution begun in the fifteenth century.

More complicated, but necessary, to distinguish a lasting classicist culture alive in Italy with Giuseppe Piermarini or Koch, and in Europe with Palladianism, which can not be defined as neo-Renaissance, as it is not a historicist revival, but a direct continuation of the classicist tradition, alive both in the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century, although sometimes minority.

Neoclassicism
Nineteenth-century neoclassicism continues the themes proposed in the previous century, including the strongly programmatic and “rationalist” character. The archaeological elements are mentioned with greater philological meaning, distinguishing between the various eras.

The invariant features are: plants blocked in regular figures, bilateral symmetry found in plan and elevation, prevalence of the trilithic system over the arched and vaults (essentially linked to the new neo-gothic trend), volumetric compositions that favor horizontal development. The materials used are stone, marble, white stucco or even brightly colored when the polychrome of Greek architecture was discovered.

The new types of public buildings
Neoclassicism is expressed above all in the design of large representative public buildings, even with new types such as: museums, libraries and public theaters.

Two works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel emerge in this context: the Berlin Schauspielhaus theater and the Altes Museum, also in Berlin. The first is designed by Schinkel in obedience to the practical function of the building, rather than monumental. The building is made up of an ionic exastyle pronaos with a pediment surmounted by statues, preceded by a high entrance staircase. The rest of the building is characterized by extreme rationality, raised on a rusticated base of height equal to that of the access staircase. The interior spaces are clearly denounced to the outside: the room with a greater height of the hall, the side bodies of the foyer. At the top of every projecting volume there is a pediment which as a recurring element unifies and brings the whole construction back to the classic.

The Altes Museum is more clearly neoclassical. The plan figure is an elongated rectangle, with a gallery on each side for the display of statues on the ground floor and paintings on the upper floor. At the center there is a round reservoir covered by a dome whose intrados are clearly derived from the Pantheon. Outside the dome is not reported, inscribed in a rectangle to favor the longitudinal aspect of the composition. The main front is disposed on a long side, it has an atrium preceded by eighteen Ionic columns on a high base from which it is accessed by an open staircase arranged in axis to the front.

The British Museum by Robert Smirke in London is similar for its marked neoclassical taste. The main front is characterized by two internal porticoes that extend outwards forming two protruding wings and the rear entrance, consisting of a pronaos surmounted by a pediment. To unify the articulated composition of the facade there are the forty eight Ionic columns that also create an evocative chiaroscuro effect. Inside, the King’s Library was later built by Smirke’s brother, Sidney. The library is characterized by the dome roof entirely made of cast iron.

Another interesting work is the St. George’s Hall in Liverpool, designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes. The building is reminiscent of the Schinkel theater for the volumetric composition and the Altes Museum for the other portico. The building is highly innovative: it has the facade of a temple although it is secular (it contains classrooms for meetings and for the administration of justice, a concert hall, etc.); it summarizes practically the entire repertoire of classical architecture. Of typically nineteenth-century, the difference between the sober exterior and the richly and eclectically decorated interior should be noted.

Religious buildings
The nineteenth-century neoclassical production in France finds its reference in the creation of the Madeleine in Paris. The building, initially designed to be a church, is then changed with the advent of Napoleon in Temple de la Gloire. The competition for the transformation was won by Pierre Vignon, a pupil of Claude Nicolas Ledoux, who created a gigantic Roman temple of Corinthian order on a high basement. The interiors were edited by Jacques-Marie Huvé which, not having a precise classical reference, creates a plant consisting of a series of square areas covered by domes, on the model of the spa facilities.

The paradigm of the Roman temple and the ancient baths are inspired by many other churches built in France after the fall of Napoleon. Reference model still in the nineteenth century is the Pantheon. To this typology belong three Italian works of great urban value: the Basilica of San Francesco di Paola in Naples, that of Sant’Antonio in Trieste and that of the Gran Madre di Dio in Turin.

The Neapolitan church, located in Piazza del Plebiscito, is framed by Murat in the largest project of accommodation on the large square in front of the Royal Palace. The winning project is that of Leopoldo Laperuta which included a church at the center of the semi-elliptical colonnade. Only the latter had been built when the church building was the subject of a new competition, won by Pietro Bianchi. Ferdinando I, returned to the throne after the second Bourbon restoration, wanted to give the building a greater sense of monumentality. The porch leads to the temple consisting of a roundabout with two chapels on the sides. The effect is acropolico, of great monumental value. The paradigm of the Pantheon is declined in an original way, with the inclusion of the two domes to cover the overgrown chapels. Inside the large dome is supported by a first order of columns and a second of pillars.

Another work modeled on the Pantheon is the church of S. Antonio in Trieste. The lot on which it insists is rectangular, so Pietro Nobile designed an elongated body divided into three classrooms. The two sides are cross-covered, the central one with a dome. So the direct intersection of the pronaos with the roundabout is missing, but outside the paradigm certainly is proposed with originality and innovation. The characteristic of the work, as has been said, lies in its urban value: the church is located at the bottom of the Grand Canal of Trieste. The facade of the temple is reflected in the water and is at the end of an obligatory prospective escape.

Another work that incorporates the model of the Pantheon, even more faithfully outside the previous two, is the church of the Great Mother of God in Turin. inserted at the mouth of the first bridge built on the Po by the French, with the hills behind it, is exalted by its urban location. The reservoir is significantly detached from the Roman model, re-proposing a contrast between concave and convex environments typical of Baroque architecture.

Works in Italy
Giuseppe Piermarini, a pupil of Vanvitelli, created the Villa Reale of Monza, inspired by the master’s casertana palace, although profoundly simplified in its forms. A disciple of Piermarini, Leopoldo Pollack, designed the Villa Reale in Milan and Villa Casati in Muggiò. In Livorno, on a project by Pasquale Poccianti, the Cisternone of Livorno was built, a building that has clear references to Roman architecture and the work of Etienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: built as a reservoir for the new city aqueduct, was conceived by the architect as a sort of propylaeum to the nineteenth-century suburbs, at the end of a path that would have led the visitor from the sources of the aqueduct to the city. Lastly, we point out the Caffè Pedrocchi in Padua, by Giuseppe Jappelli.

Palladianism
The nineteenth-century production of villas and residences remains strongly linked to Palladianism and the recovery of the neo-Renaissance tradition, more than the classical ones. Little or nothing really innovative was built in the nineteenth century in the residential typology.

Revivalist styles

Neogothic
The neo-gothic presents the following invariants: plants and unblocked risers, irreducible to elementary figures, prevalence of asymmetry, clearly vertical composition, effects of transparency and luminosity, resumption of the pointed arches and of the ogival vaults, use of the decorations. However, sometimes the neogothic loses the sense of the majestic, of the out-scale, of the unreal, based on principles such as the economy of the structure, the constructive correctness that will be the foundation for the architecture of iron.

While neoclassical, in general, is better suited to urban environments, the neogothic, especially in residential types, pursues the goal of the picturesque: adapt the building to the landscape.

Let us now analyze the main neo-gothic works of the century. The neo-Gothic revival has affinity both with the style of the neo-Renaissance and with the architecture of iron.

The All Saints Church of William Butterfield in London is an important work. The church emerges on a side street, almost hidden if it were not for the tower that emerges from the urban profile. The church is part of a square plot. From the road leads to a small courtyard on which to the left leads to the rectory, to the right of the school and frontally, from the long side, to the church. Outside you can see the alternating use of red and black bricks, in order to obtain pleasant decorations. Inside the church is characterized by the flat apse, the three aisles covered by an ogival vault. The composition of the volumes of the rectory, of the school, of the church and of the high tower is organic and functional to ecclesiastical needs.

Another important neogothic work is the University of Oxford Museum, designed and built by Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward. The exterior, characterized by two orders of mullioned windows, pitched roof and façade tower, re-proposes the polychrome and minimalist character of Italian Gothic.

Interesting is the entrance hall with three naves surmounted by an iron and glass roof, made with pointed arches supported by bundles of cast iron pillars. The arches are pierced with floral decorations, the capitals with acanthus leaves. The metal structure re-proposes the masonry ribs of Gothic architecture in the new material. The great transparency and brightness is essentially linked to the roof: the enclosure is surrounded on all sides by a porch of the loggias type on loggias whose module on the ground floor is marked by two arches, the first by four arches, always on the sixth acute.

Ruskin also collaborated in the work, personally providing the design of the windows of the lodges. Ruskin, a deep adversary of iron architecture, collaborates in the realization of the work, as he seems to see in the naturalistic decorations of the iron tunnels, floral ornaments or faunistic features of Gothic architecture, which translates and reflects the admiration for the nature. The hall is also intended to accommodate the reconstruction of skeletons of prehistoric animals whose bone structure is strangely assonant with the metallic one, suggesting a suggestion of morphological affinity.

A minor, but definitely innovative, work is the church of St-Eugene by Louis-Auguste Boileau. The exterior is made almost entirely of brick, with ogival windows and three gables. The interior, with three naves, is made entirely of iron: pillars, longitudinal and transverse arches, fretworks of the windows, rosettes, vaulting. Boileau interpreted to the letter the idea of Viollet-le-Duc for which the Gothic cathedrals, with their structure, are the direct precedent of the modern skeleton architecture. However, Viollet-le-Duc referred rather to a design and constructive method than to the recovery of morphological elements.

Anatole de Baudot, a pupil of Viollet-le-Duc, is the first architect to build a reinforced concrete church. Despite the use of such an innovative technology, the architect still presented a “neo-gothic morphology”.

Neogreco
Julien-David Leroy, historian of architecture and master of Durand, had in 1758 published a beautiful reconstruction of the Propylaea of Athens. The theme is promptly taken up by Carl Gotthard Langhans in the project of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. It has a colonnade hexastyle modern Greek -style Doric, a composition of elements calling the Propylaea, although the proportions are just Doric. The gate represents not only access to the city of Berlin, but a monument that marks access to German neoclassicism. The theme is also included in the project ofWilliam Wolins for the entrance of Downing College in Cambridge and the Propylaea of Leo von Klenze on the Konigsplatz in Munich.

The theme of propylaea is also declined by Friedrich Gilly in the monument to Frederick the Great. The unrealized monument consists of three parts:

a large enclosure divided by closed volumes with four openings, two with colonnades that recall the propylaea and two with arches surmounted by truncated conical roofs reminiscent of some Ledoux barrieres;
another podium-base with two access arches in axis with the propylaea
and finally,

the Doric temple periptero above the podium. In the composition is evident a prevalence of the full on the voids that are in this way enhanced for their uniqueness.
The Gilly project will be taken up by Schinkel and Leo von Klenze, author of Walhalla at Ratisbona and a pupil of Gilly. Klenze wins the project for the construction of the German Walhalla or Pantheon, according to Schinkel. The Walhalla in Norse mythology is the place where the souls of heroes killed in war were gathered, welcomed by the Valkyries.

Ludovico di Baviera decided to make the monument as a German Pantheon, on the occasion of Napoleon ‘s defeat in Leipzig. The construction is a peripteral temple, placed in an acropolis position. The defeat of Napoleon in Leipzig and the other suffered by the Roman legions by the Germanic peoples are respectively carved in his two gables. The high base is divided into stairs and terraces. The interior features busts of great Germans: Leibniz, Schiller, Mozart, etc. as well as a sculpted frieze that tells the history of Germany.

A must-see is the Canoviano di Possagno Temple, probably designed by the sculptor Antonio Canova (with the collaboration of Giannantonio Selva) to leave the memory of himself in his native city. The building still offers the coupling of the Pantheon roundabout and the pronaos derived from the Parthenon. The building reaches a high level of majesty, grandeur and grandiose solemnity.

New style
With Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, numerous Egyptian finds arrive in Europe. The enthusiasm for the Napoleonic campaign and the interest in a different culture, lead to the development of a neo-Egyptian style, not only in France.

Neo-Renaissance style
Most of the nineteenth-century production, however, is inspired by the Renaissance, because of various factors and mainly because all the teaching of the Fine Arts academies was focused on the work of the great Italian treatises and on the architecture of the sixteenth century, remained an ideal aesthetic reference for European culture. To these elements was added the spread of texts that had great influence in the building design, as they established models capable of conferring historical dignity to the needs of the emerging industrial society among them it is worth mentioning Palais, maison, et autres édifices modernés à Rome, by Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine(1809), and Edifices de Rome moderne, by Paul Letarouilly (from 1840).

The neo- renaissance architecture in fact resumed the formal apparatus of Renaissance architecture, coming to the imitation of specific monumental buildings, among the most famous, albeit in a modern way, with intentionally revivalist intent and with careful philology, distinguishing also between the various phases development of architecture between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and among the various masters of the Renaissance.

The salient features of the neo-renaissance buildings are: the search for a simple and blocked volume, the presence of one or more courtyards, the constant presence of symmetry, tympanum or newsstand windows, the presence of columns and pilasters, squares and frames, decorations and more elements that exalt the architectural values of the facade. Other characteristic features are the use of ashlar, especially for the base and other decorative elements taken from the Renaissance period.

The neo-Renaissance works, belong to all types of buildings including buildings for housing, the most expanding type that was sought to confer historical dignity by taking as a model the Renaissance palaces, whose typology also allowed to build block buildings that occupy entirely the lot, as well as to join other adjacent buildings. Public buildings such as theaters, libraries, museums, banks, spa buildings, churches, etc. are also widespread.

The neo-Renaissance revival was established in the middle of the century, in reaction to the neo-Gothic, but important works also in the first half of the century and anticipations also in the eighteenth century (for example the work of Giuseppe Piermarini), not to mention the enduring Palladianism, which however it did not have a revivalist character, but it was a direct continuation of a long tradition.

Among the most successful neo-Renaissance works, those of Italian taste designed in Munich by Leo von Klenze: the Palazzo Leuchtenberg (1816), inspired by the Palazzo Farnese, the Ministry of War, designed as a revival of the Palazzo Medici, and still the Konigsbau (1826 – 1835), modeled on the reference of Palazzo Pitti, the Pinacoteca (1826 – 1830), perhaps the most important work of Klenze, whose model is still Italian, the Palazzo della Cancelleria and that shows all the characteristic elements of the style.

Sir Charles Barry introduced the neo-Renaissance in London. His two main works are the Traveler’s Club, inspired by the Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence, and the Reform Club, inspired by the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. In particular, for the Reform Club he designed an internal courtyard with a square plan, with two orders of raised loggias, covered by an elegant nineteenth-century iron and glass vault. The reference to Antonio da Sangallo is evident in the motif of the windows, with a flat frame on the first order and a tympanum on the second, for the bosses arranged on the corners of the building and the heavy cornice.

In Italy, anticipations of new trends can be found already from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the most eclectic characters emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century, during the building renewal and urban expansions following the unification of the kingdom of Italy, continuing until the early twentieth century, when this style uniformed the new buildings built following the plans to demolish and reconstruct some historic centers. For example, neorenaissance marks have the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II of Milan (begun in 1865), the Palazzo delle Assicurazioni Generali (1871) and the arcades of the square of the Republic (1885 – 1895) in Florence, the Palazzo Koch in Rome (1880 – 1892), the Galleria Umberto I (1887 – 1890) and the Stock Exchange Palace of Naples (1895- 1899).

The style also developed in Eastern Europe, especially in Prague, in the Kingdom of Hungary (Opera Theater and St. Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest) and in Russia (for example the Vladimirsky Palace in St. Petersburg).

Instead, in France a current inspired by the French Classicism spread and therefore characterized by large pavilion roofs; this scheme was introduced in the reconstruction of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, reached its peak in the completion of the Louvre and was also taken up in England and America.

Neobarocco
The neo-baroque was never configured in the nineteenth century as a precise revival, rather it should be considered as characterized by grandeur, astonishment, redundancy; the neo-baroque remains far from the Berninian, Borrominian or Guarinian forms. Neo-baroque architecture paradigmatic can be considered the Opera Theater of Jean-Louis-Charles Garnier. The theater building, in fact, is a neo-Renaissance building, inspired more by the Italian sixteenth century than by the French one. His figure of plan is roughly inscribed in a rectangle divided into four parts: the atrium with the staircase, thesemicircular hall, the deep stage and the local service backrooms. Each environment is characterized by a different height. Behind the stage develop environments for bridesmaids, smokers and all the environments that Garnier considered an integral part of the show. Each side of the rectangle has an entrance: on the main front the pedestrian one, on the back side the access to the stage, on the long sides the one for the carriages and the imperial one.

The main façade is characterized by a portico with two orders of seven bays: on the first level a theory of arches on pillars, of which the two slightly protruding ends; on the upper level there are twin columns supporting the monumental trabeation which is surmounted by arched tympanums in the protruding side spans. As an enrichment of the colonnaded floor there is a mezzanine supported by slender columns that make the twin order giant.

The building is densely decorated with the use of colors, diversity of materials, garlands, glazes, tunnels, single sculptures or marble groups.

Neoromanico

Neobizantino

Georgian style

Historicist eclecticism as stylistic hybridization
The basic eclecticism of the nineteenth-century architectural culture also creates episodes and particular aspects not entirely framed in the subdivision into styles, giving life to buildings that eclectically combine elements of Greco-Roman ancestry with others of Romanesque, Gothic or Renaissance origins.

In this category we can ascribe the church of Saint Vincent de Paul in Paris by Jacques-Ignace Hittorff. The church has a basilica plant with three naves. The exposed wooden truss roof is supported by a double row of columns. The main front, preceded by a wide staircase, is characterized by the presence of an exastyle pronaos, but above all by the two side towers, characteristic of Romanesque or Gothic architecture. However, the towers are declined with a typically neo-Renaissance language: pilasterscorner, frames, gable windows. Still the balustrade between the two towers, adorned with statues, is a typical element taken from the Renaissance tradition. Hittorff is among the main proponents of the polychromy of Greek architecture and on the model of these columns colors pink, has the fascia that separates the two orders and color the trusses of red, blue and gold.

The theme of the Romanesque-Gothic tower implanted in buildings of classical matrix is also repeated in the cathedral of Copenhagen by Christian Hansen, where a massive tower is inserted in the rectangular building, in axis with an exastyle pronaos. The interior is characterized by an array of arches on pillars supporting the matroneo and a second order of Doric columns supporting the barrel vault with lacunars of clear Roman inspiration. The interior has been repeatedly compared to the Boullée Library

Urbanism and urban transformations
An important sociological phenomenon linked to the affirmation of the industrial economy is the strong growth of cities to a much greater extent than in previous centuries. In the nineteenth century a new town planning was formed in which transport and infrastructure in general, trade, industry and urban management gain importance and attention.

Among the main interventions of neoclassical urban planning, the first in chronological order is that of Rue de Rivoli in Paris, designed by the Napoleonic architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine and completed under Napoleon III. The two architects, inventors of the Empire Style, design a straight line of continuous buildings on porticoes, of which only the facades are designed, leaving the construction of the buildings behind it to private parties. In this way they obtain an effect of the uniqueness of the fronts. However, to radically transform the city was the plan for the city of Paris, of the Baron Haussmann.

In England, during the period of the Prince of Wales regency, a remarkable intervention was that of the construction of the residential district owned by the crown in the park of Marylebone with the connection, through a new road, with St James’s Park. The new road ran through a poor and dilapidated housing area that was restored. Designer and part entrepreneur of the work was John Nash.

In the southern part of Regent’s Park, Nash designs long series of terraced houses, arranged on terraces, so that each of them could enjoy the view of the park, which remained at least for half to public green. In the southernmost part of the park, an arrangement of semi-circular houses, called Park Crescent, leads to the Regent Street, a road linking the park to the residence of the regent. The new road has a non-straight line, the joints are essentially due to architectural pre-existences or land holdings owned by nobles, especially wighs, which Nash avoids invading.

A Roma was rearranged the Piazza del Popolo. In fact, despite the monumental presences such as the Twin Churches of Rainaldi, the Egyptian obelisk, the Porta del Popolo, the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo and the convent, the square had the character of a confused suburb. The first project by Giuseppe Valadierforesaw the construction of two large buildings for barracks in such a way as to define a trapezoidal square, with the Twin Churches on the major base and the Porta del Popolo on the smaller one. The houses in the square and the convent were demolished. The presence of the two large buildings by barracks, however, would have diminished the monumental value of the architecture in the square and therefore Valadier decided to update the project with the replacement of the two buildings with as many gardens bordered by iron railings to define the invaded square of trapezoidal shape. Although the gardens exalted the monuments of the square, they helped to make the square bare.

In Milan Giovanni Antolini, near the Castello Sforzesco, designs the Foro Bonaparte (1800-1801). Antolini proposes a new road system, based on rigid geometric patterns, in an attempt to transform Milan into a modern and regular city, with roads connecting the various important poles of the city, such as the Duomo and the Castle, as well as new squares. But because of the operational problems and above all the necessary economic resources, as early as 1802, the project is in fact shelved and will never be realized. Nonetheless, the Antolini project remains as evidence of a moment of great intellectual ferment and experimentation. Then when Luigi Canonicais responsible for redesigning the Milan plant with alternative proposals for straight lines, will resume all proposals, giving up the same forum. Canonica is also the author of the triumphal arch of the Sempione in Milan.

In the years between 1850 and 1880 we witnessed the redevelopment, expansion and redevelopment of various European cities such as Paris, Barcelona, Vienna, Brussels and Naples.

In 1857 in Vienna the expansion of the Ringstrasse, designed by Emil von Forster, took place.

Paradigmatic were the interventions in Paris, under Napoleon III, led by the prefect Haussmann. The Paris plan incorporates solutions already identified by Napoleon as the demolition of the city, the demolition of numerous buildings for the construction of three straight road axes (including Rue de Rivoli) to clean up the city’s urban layout and offer the possibility of create new public and private buildings. In addition to the opera house, the baroque extension of the Louvre and the realization of the Central Halls, characterized by the Polonceau truss covering, are also included in the plan.

Source from Wikipedia