Europe (including Russia and Turkey)

Since history began to be written at different times in different places, there can be no clear-cut chronology of prehistoric architecture in Europe, but one can trace similarities in form and function among funerary and ritual structures in a number of regions, notably the great stone circles of England and northern France, and the remarkable tomb structures of Malta. Some of the first inhabitable works of monumental architecture in Europe appear in the Aegean, and first of all on the island of Crete. Minoan buildings, interestingly, were not primarily religious in nature, but residential: the great unfortified Palace at Knossos, built from the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, comprised a large number of storage spaces and residential chambers densely packed around a central courtyard. Serviced by running water and drainage, the palace rooms featured brilliantly coloured frescoes. The exact usage of many spaces at Knossos is unknown, but its labyrinthine and asymmetrical plan may well have suggested later legends of the Minotaur. Rising in places to three stories in height, the palace apparently made use of sturdy wooden columns that swelled towards the top. All such palaces in Crete were destroyed by a great natural cataclysm around 1400 BCE, only to be discovered, excavated and partly reconstructed by Sir Arthur Evans in the 19th century.

The other great archaeologist of bronze-age Aegean cultures, Heinrich Schliemann, made his sensational discoveries further north, when he unearthed the legendary cities of Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s. Flourishing in the 14th century BCE, the more militaristic Mycenaean civilisation focused on the erection of fortified hilltop residences, such as Tiryns and Mycenae, which were at the same time the headquarters of sophisticated administrations. The royal palaces were planned around a large rectangular audience hall, known as a megaron, which later proved to be the ancestor of the naos, or enclosed sanctuary, of Greek temples. These citadels were defended by massive walls of irregular masonry, the great size of the individual boulders earning this structural method the epithet of “cyclopean.” Associated with these citadels was the distinctive typology of the tholos, or “beehive” tomb. Approached by a long stone-lined corridor (dromos) cut into the earth, the tholos utilised a simple method of corbelling to create a surprisingly tall conical dome of finely-cut stone over the anteroom to the burial chamber.

Following the lead of the Egyptians, the Greeks developed a monumental religious architecture in stone that set the precedent for Western building down to the present day. Excavations have confirmed that the first Greek temples appear to have been of timber and mud construction, though over time these came to be replaced by more durable versions in stone. This meant, however, that structural and decorative forms first deployed in wood were thus duplicated in limestone, setting into motion the development of the Greek Orders—the essential language of the Classical system of architecture. The basic principle of column, capital and entablature was likely picked up from Egypt, but the Greeks, having once established the basic parti of their temple, began a long process of experimentation and refinement until a perfected or standardised set of forms and proportions, felt to be the most beautiful, were delineated. The Doric, simplest and most masculine of the Orders, had minimal ornamentation, but its proportions became increasingly fine-tuned over the centuries, culminating in the extraordinary achievement of the Parthenon in Athens. Developed at about the same time was the more feminine Ionic Order, recognisable for its slender proportions and the spiral volutes of its capital. The Corinthian Order, which appeared infrequently on later Greek buildings, is more elaborate and showy, the capital being wrapped with stylised acanthus leaves. In all cases the Greeks relied on a simple system of trabeation, and it might be said that their major achievement was one of supreme aesthetic refinement rather than technical innovation. Another important Greek typology was that of the open-air theatre: the remarkably well-preserved example at Epidauros (c. 350 BCE) was built into a natural hollow in the land and designed to seat 14,000 spectators. Its concentric stone seating once focused on a large orchestra area for dancers, an architectural backdrop known as the skene, and a raised platform, or proskenion (proscenium), where the actors would play their roles.

The Etruscan civilisation, reaching its height on the Italian peninsula in the 6th century BCE, laid the foundations for many later Roman building practises. The Etruscans had already developed a knack for laying out well-planned, serviced and defended city-states like Perugia and Volterra. They focused their decorative impulses on tomb structures: in some cases these constitute remarkable stone replicas of domestic interiors of the time, complete with carved utensils hanging on the walls. The necropolis at Tarquinia (c. 700 BCE), chief of the twelve cities of the Etruscan League, includes some 6000 tombs, many of which have vividly frescoed walls depicting everyday life.

The conquering Romans, then beginning their rise to imperial power, took over the Etruscan model of the temple, which featured a deep columnar porch fronting a dark sanctuary. This local influence was almost immediately overshadowed by the Roman love for everything Greek: the sprawling empire established by Alexander the Great had already spread Hellenic modes of building throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and the three Greek Orders—Doric, Ionic and Corinthian—were then imported wholesale into Italy. If the Romans were not especially original with regard to architectural style, which tended largely towards ever more elaborate and ostentatious versions of Greek forms, they are certainly notable for their engineering prowess, which was not to be equaled for many centuries. The extensive use of the round arch allowed aqueducts of tremendous length to be constructed, and large buildings such as baths and markets could be made durable and fireproof through stone vaulting. The Romans soon broadened their use of the arch into the creation of barrel vaults and domes, allowing monumental architecture to achieve hitherto unsuspected effects of capacious internal space. In this connection, it has often been said that Greek architecture is primarily sculptural (i.e., external) in nature, whereas Roman architecture is spatial. Though masters of stone and brick masonry, it was the Romans’ increasing expertise with concrete—made possible by the easy availability of volcanic rock suitable for the mixing of cement—that allowed them to build quickly and on a colossal scale, as witnessed by the coffered dome of the Roman Pantheon or the great vaulted spaces of many of their public buildings. Apart from the round temple, represented in its fullest form by the Pantheon, the Romans developed a variety of new building typologies associated with the administration of large populations of imperial citizens. These included the forum (a religious and civic complex), the basilica (an administrative and legal meeting hall), the amphitheatre for athletic or gladiatorial entertainments, the multi-level apartment block (insulae), the public baths (thermae) and the triumphal arch. In line with their love of decoration, the Romans preferred to clad their concrete walls with facings of stucco, travertine or multicoloured stone, just as their domestic floors were often covered with mosaics and their walls with fresco paintings. In the same vein, the Greek Orders, though frequently invoked, soon came to assume the character of decorative appendages—half-columns or pilasters—rather than structural units.

The chaotic centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, which entailed the substantial loss of much architectural and engineering expertise, nevertheless witnessed a slow but determined effort to recapture the forgotten art of stone vaulting. This was applied primarily to the foremost monumental structures of the time: large churches, monasteries and related buildings of a religious character. The earliest dedicated churches in Christendom, as established by the Emperor Constantine, made use of the Roman basilica typology as best suited to the needs of officially sanctioned Christian worship; i.e., the provision of a large gathering space for congregations, circulation routes for pilgrims and visitors, and an increasingly sacred hierarchy of spaces laid out along an axis culminating in an apse or sanctuary, the latter housing the altar as the focus of Christian mystery and sacramental ritual. The old basilica of St. Peter in Rome (324-354), with its atrium (forecourt), narthex (porch), double aisles, transept and terminal apse, established an important prototype, as did the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (begun c. 325). Round churches, usually serving as martyria, again derived much of their form and structure from Roman precedent; Santa Costanza in Rome (324) provided the model.

The Byzantine tradition, which emerged from the eastern Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople, emphasised the sacred symbolism of the dome. Various experiments were made as to how a round dome could be fitted onto a square base by the use of squinches or pendentives. Here the supreme achievement is the great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (523-537), whose plan combines both axial (or basilican) and centralised qualities to focus attention on the great dome, the largest since the Pantheon. Its exterior demanded heavy buttressing, partly provided by half-domed chapels. Inside, the resulting effect was one of otherworldly lightness as the shallow dome, springing from a continuous sequence of clerestorey windows, seemed to contemporary chroniclers to be suspended weightlessly from heaven. This essentially anti-tectonic appearance was further heightened by sunbeams picking out details of the dazzling gold mosaics that lined the walls. A contemporary basilican church in Ravenna, Sant’Apollinare in Classe (532-549), which was again built under the patronage of the Emperor Justinian, epitomises the Byzantine preference for a plain exterior and an elaborate interior: the nave arcading rests on marble columns of Classical inspiration, while the great rounded apse, vaulted with a half-dome, glows with vivid mosaics. Such striking and dramatic effects remain the hallmark of the Byzantine tradition to the present day in the domed Orthodox churches of Greece, Russia and other regions.

As Western Europe entered the Dark Ages, most Classical learning was lost or forgotten. Tribal cultures in the north evolved a tradition of large-scale timber construction for halls and similar structures, a tradition that was to persist until the advent of industrialisation. A high point in the recovery of masonry building technique was reached in the early 9th century under the Frankish leader Charlemagne, whose court at Aachen was a deliberate emulation of half-remembered Roman imperial precedent as filtered through Byzantine culture. The centralised chapel of Charlemagne’s palace, covered by a dome-shaped vault, drew inspiration from San Vitale in Ravenna, and its marble columns, mosaics and bronze fittings were brought from Italy. Larger churches of the Carolingian and succeeding Ottonian periods adopted the basilican plan, which remained a standard feature of church design through the rest of the Middle Ages. After the year 1000, monumental church building exploded throughout the continent. Drawing inspiration from Roman masonry technique (particularly the round arch), the major problem of the builders of the so-called Romanesque period (c. 1000-1200) was to roof large expanses in stone rather than the more expedient but fire-prone timber. An innovation came in the form of the ribbed cross vault, as at Durham Cathedral or St.-Etienne at Caen, while other experiments included naves covered by barrel vaults or a succession of domes. Along the well-trodden route to Santiago di Compostela a series of new churches accommodated a constant stream of religious pilgrims by the provision of double aisles and ambulatories around the apse, thus allowing the easy circulation of crowds along the inner perimeter of the entire church, behind the altar, and past a variety of chapels, relics and shrines. Because of the weight of the stone vaulting, Romanesque walls remained thick and heavy, with small window openings. Externally, the dominant appearance of Romanesque architecture was thus closed and fortress-like, relieved by the occasional application of round arches in decorative arcades, monastic cloisters or telescoping entrance portals. The same massively conservative building technique and severe appearance also mark the many fortified castles of this era, particularly in England, France and Crusader outposts in the Holy Land.

The 12th century witnessed an increasing amount of trade between European cities and the near East, as funneled through Venice. This new prosperity soon found material expression in both religious and secular architecture. In Paris and the nearby cities of northern France, churches and cathedrals came to assume unprecedented qualities of height, openness and splendour. This was made possible by the structural innovations of the so-called Gothic mode of building: these comprise the pointed arch (most likely borrowed from Islamic buildings that had been seen during the Crusades), rib vaulting and flying buttresses. As first manifested on a modest scale in the ambulatory of the Basilica of Saint-Denis, near Paris (1137 and later), the Gothic system constituted a structurally robust if spatially daring system of skeletal framing which needed only minimal masonry infill for walls and vaulting. Window openings could now occupy entire wall planes, and were often filled with vast expanses of stained glass that flooded church interiors with an otherworldly spectrum of colours. Using only simple geometry and a conservative process of trial and error (which not infrequently ended in disaster), the Gothic master masons succeeded in erecting a series of monumental churches of increasing height and complexity, a line that can be traced through the cathedrals of Laon, Notre-Dame of Paris, Chartres, Reims, Amiens and Beauvais. Apart from these crucial structural considerations, the Gothic should at the same time be read as a highly symbolic mode of expression in which each element of the building contributes to the overriding notion of the church as a model of the heavenly Jerusalem: the soaring vertical lines of its piers, windows and spires point unequivocally to heaven, while its entrance portals served as a public locus for the most complex and manifold sculptural representations of Christian iconography, especially the Last Judgment. The employment of itinerant master masons soon brought the Gothic style to all regions of the continent, and it developed notably idiosyncratic local inflections in England, Italy, Spain and the regions of Eastern Europe. Although it held sway for some three centuries, Gothic building did not become more technically innovative in its later phases; rather, an increasing love of elaborate decoration took hold, whether in the French Flamboyant and Rayonnant styles, or the English Decorated and Perpendicular styles. In this period many secular buildings also became more architecturally ambitious and splendidly finished: the great town and guild halls of northern Europe, such as those at Ypres and Bruges, proclaim the sources of much of the new wealth, and even individual houses, like that of Jacques Coeur at Bourges (1443-1451) or the waterfront mansions along Venice’s Grand Canal, manifested a new courtly elegance.

Following the lead of Humanist scholars who began to refocus attention on the Classical legacy in literature, architects of the Italian Renaissance (literally, ‘rebirth’) made concerted efforts to reestablish the Classical tradition in architecture. By the early 15th century, architects like Brunelleschi were visiting the half-buried remains of Roman edifices in an attempt to determine the proportions, details and structural techniques of the ancient builders. In many cases the Roman ruins had lost much of their decorative veneer, ostensibly suggesting to Renaissance architects the primacy and beauty of simple geometry and harmonic proportions. In the churches and palaces of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, Michelozzo and Sangallo, a convincing—and increasingly sculptural—Classicism began to emerge, a style that slowly came to supplant older Gothic traditions throughout Italy. Apart from the reappearance of such familiar Classical motifs as columns, capitals, round arches and entablature mouldings, the keynote of this new-old architecture was its geometric clarity and additive—or modular—quality. This can be sensed in the fascination on the part of Leonardo da Vinci and other architects for circular or central-plan churches, as put into practise at Cola da Caprarola’s Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi (1508), as well as the repetitive bays of many nave elevations and palace façades; in Florence, Brunelleschi’s church of San Lorenzo (begun 1424) and Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai (1446-1451) are typical. Perhaps the crowning moment of the High Renaissance was the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica itself, planned by Bramante as a geometrically perfect centralised building on an unprecedentedly colossal scale. As partly executed by Michelangelo in the mid-16th century, the great crossing and dome of St. Peter’s, evincing a creative and muscular approach to Classical design, set the tone for the Baroque monuments of Europe in the following century.

Baroque architecture is generally defined as exhibiting characteristics of ornamental flamboyance, sculptural plasticity, curving motion, building climaxes, theatrical illusion in the use of light and shade, and impressive scale. Perhaps most importantly, the Baroque constitutes a language of propaganda, either religious or secular, and in this capacity made use of the emotional effectiveness of its grand gestures to convince visitors to churches and palaces of the legitimacy and majesty of the ruling powers. The Baroque impulse necessarily flowed from Rome, where St. Peter’s manifested Papal authority on the greatest possible scale. Through the 17th century, smaller churches in Rome by Bernini and Borromini began to experiment with unusual and complex geometries in plan and elevation; in combination with the careful stage management of directed light, this was calculated to produce an effect of astonishment and spiritual exhilaration in the religious visitor. In the next century such unabashedly theatrical effects would be taken to even greater extremes in the churches of the Catholic regions of southern Germany—the Asam brothers’ church of St. Johann Nepomuk in Munich (1733-1746) is a good example—though they were largely resisted in both France and England. Mansart’s church of the Invalides in Paris (1670-1708), with its wonderfully sculptural façade and soaring gilded dome, certainly has much in common with St. Peter’s and other Baroque churches in Rome, but ultimately it evinces a well-balanced grandeur rather than restless movement. And Versailles, the vast court of Louis XIV near Paris, is deemed to be Baroque largely by virtue of its unprecedented scale and lavishness, but a closer inspection of its seemingly endless façades reveals an articulation that is both conservative and impeccably professional, indicative of the increasing formalisation of doctrinaire Classical principles in the French academic tradition. English Baroque, as represented largely by the monumental and stylistically innovative churches and palaces of Wren, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, developed at some remove from continental practise, and is more often than not restrained by the more sedate domestic traditions of Dutch building. Eastern Europe took more whole-heartedly to Baroque aesthetics, and a late and colourful version flourished in Russia in the 18th century thanks to Imperial patronage of architects brought in from Italy: the Russian Orthodox church of Rastrelli’s Smolny Convent, St. Petersburg (1748-1764), built for the Empress Elizabeth, has a dizzyingly vertical façade with angled twin towers topped by slender onion domes.

A short-lived coda to the Baroque is represented by the Rococo, largely a style of interior decoration. Developed in the salons of Louis XV-era France and subsequently exported to the German courts, the Rococo miniaturised, lightened and multiplied the more robust curves of the Baroque to achieve elegant and frothy decorative effects. These often move beyond any lingering respect for Classical order to evince the barely controlled chaos of vegetative growth. In its carefree and fanciful tone, the Rococo provided the perfect domestic setting for the witty conversation, ornate costume and endless court intrigues of the period, though these same qualities would soon come to be rebuked by a rising generation of architects as decadent and licentious.

In the mid-18th century, the rediscovery of the ancient cities of Pompeii (n° 232; n° 233) and Herculaneum, which had been buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, gave new impetus to the search for an authentic Classicism in architecture. Since visitors could now stroll along the streets of an actual Roman city and examine the interiors of ancient houses, shops and public buildings, aristocratic patrons of architecture began to demand a new archaeological correctness in terms of typology and style, one that had not been quite so pressing in the earlier Renaissance period. Neoclassicism was in fact conceived as a deliberate reproach to the perceived lapse in taste represented by the preceding Baroque and Rococo periods: instead of irregular curves and ornamental bombast, Neoclassicism prescribed simple rectilinear geometries; instead of religious ecstasy and melodrama, Neoclassicism—as an essential part of the Enlightenment project—proposed a sober dignity that spoke of man’s innate rationality. In the domestic sphere, designers like Robert Adam used Roman motifs to produce interiors of an opulent Classicism that was well suited to patrons who saw themselves, through their education and social position, as the heirs to ancient Roman virtue. For large public buildings like houses of government, banks and even churches, Neoclassicism lent an air of timelessness and grave dignity to European cities that no other style could offer.

By 1800 the Neoclassical urge seemed to reign supreme, but a new restlessness with the fixed certainties of the Classical system had already begun to appear. In general, this new Romantic trend reacted against Neoclassical restraint by proposing a return to emotionality and feeling. This took on a number of architectural manifestations. On the one hand, French architects like Ledoux and Boullée could force the simple forms of Neoclassicism to a megalomaniac extreme through a process of ruthless simplification and colossal enlargement, resulting in an architecture of massive gloom that was intended to evoke a sense of awe—a manifestation, in fact, of the aesthetic category of the ‘Sublime’, which was more frequently invoked by theorists of the period to describe vast and frightening natural phenomena such as storms, waterfalls or mountain scenery. On the other hand, some architects now began to take a more serious look at the previously maligned heritage of medieval Europe, and the features of Gothic churches and monasteries were studied seriously with an eye to using them in the design of contemporary houses, churches and public buildings. The rise and institutional acceptance of the neo-Gothic is best symbolised by the erection of the new Houses of Parliament in London (begun 1836), whose Classically regular façades by Sir Charles Barry were covered in acres of convincingly medieval ornaments designed by the untiring A.W.N. Pugin, one of the few architects in Europe to have a firm grasp of Gothic style and principles at this date. Eventually inspiring a group of like-minded reformers, Pugin’s active campaigning for the more widespread adoption of the Gothic style in England was primarily motivated by religious impulses. The choice of style, it appeared, was rapidly assuming the character of a moral rather than an aesthetic debate in the 19th century, and indeed the period as a whole has aptly been characterised as a ‘battle of the styles’. In another direction, the great expansion of Europe’s colonial frontiers had opened the eyes of travelers and architects to a whole range of stylistic possibilities beyond the European heritage, and experiments in the so-called ‘exotic’ styles began to appear here and there. The Prince Regent’s entertainment pavilion at Brighton (1815-1823), with its eclectic mixture of Islamic, Indian and Chinese motifs, is characteristic of this trend. Perhaps just as importantly, a new notion of relativity in stylistic matters insinuated itself into the architectural discourse, and just as inevitably architects now began asking themselves not only which style was best, but why the accepted historical styles—and most particularly Classicism—should have any monopoly on current practise. Taking the issue further, some even began to wonder what a contemporary style for the 19th century might look like, and the search for a ‘modern’ architecture was on.

With the rise of the Industrial Revolution the question of style soon became conflated with the question of technology: architects undertook a troubled consideration of how the new advances in materials and structures—most notably the introduction of metallic building elements—could profitably be employed to architectural ends. A radical but popularly successful example, which served to propel the debate, came in the form of the Crystal Palace, the great structure of iron, glass and wood that housed the World’s Fair of 1851 in London. Paxton’s huge transparent greenhouse thrilled its many visitors but perplexed architectural commentators, who looked in vain for any vestige of recognised style, articulation, ornament or typology. This lack of architectural pedigree was seen as a crucial impediment to the acceptance of the Crystal Palace as ‘architecture’. One important school of architectural thought, that of the Arts-and-Crafts movement, then began to promote a revival of traditional handicrafts as a way by which human value could be re-infused into the apparently rote and mechanistic practise of building—here John Ruskin and William Morris were the prophets, and the sympathetic but ostensibly retrograde search for a route back to an idealised Middle Ages continued to hold sway in some sectors of European architecture—notably domestic buildings—long into the new century.

A cautious approach to technological innovation on the part of some Victorian architects was to apply new materials to old forms, so that, for example, it was not uncommon to find Renaissance columns and Gothic arches reproduced in cast iron—the interiors of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris (1843-1851) or Deane and Woodward’s University Museum, Oxford (1853-1860) are characteristic in this respect. For progressive thinkers, however, this eclecticism came to represent a failure of nerve, and a more thoroughgoing effort to achieve an approach that was new in both form and technique became the nucleus of the modern movement. The Art Nouveau movement of the 1890s, spearheaded by Horta and Guimard, provided an early answer, reproducing the a-historic forms of plants, leaves and tendrils in wrought iron and other materials. As manifested in the work of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and other architects of the ‘heroic’ 1920s, however, the new style was less a matter of surface decoration and aesthetics than of a radically new approach to design, which aimed to pose questions of function, use and economy—rather than nostalgia or ostentation—as the starting point of any modern building. These ideas were the hallmark of the Russian Constructivist school, who positioned the abstract forms of architectural modernism as the herald of a new phase of human social and political organisation. As markers of a new ‘machine aesthetic’ appropriate to the industrial age, materials such as concrete, iron, steel and glass were now pressed into service for houses and more formal public buildings. At the same time, under the influence of abstract art, the formal vocabulary of architecture was radically simplified to the most basic geometric volumes, even to the extent that such features as discrete window openings and pitched roofs could commonly be regarded as outmoded. Instead, broad planar surfaces, stripped of all decoration and colour, gave an elegant, if stark, appearance to many modern buildings. Roofs became flat, and windows were grouped into long horizontal strips. Spatial planning, too, became looser and less symmetrical, geared to the effective housing of spaces of different function rather than attempting to impose a falsely hierarchical order onto façades, as had often been the case in the Classical tradition. A point of crystallisation was reached with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s masterplanning of the Weissenhof model housing estate in Stuttgart (1927), which revealed the remarkable uniformity of aesthetic approach then prevailing among many progressive architects from across Europe. Ultimately, however, modernism painted itself into a corner: having reduced the architectural vocabulary to an absolute minimum—the mythical ‘glass box’—it was forced to confront the fact that subjectivity, expressivity and formal experimentation had in many cases been removed from the equation, and that it was consequently difficult to imagine any radically new futures for architecture. After the Second World War there would be a reaction to orthodox modernism in the form of greater sculptural and expressive form, as spearheaded by Le Corbusier’s great Unité d’Habitation, an apartment complex at Marseilles (1945-1952), and his pilgrimage church at Ronchamp (1950-55). At the same time, increasing attention began to be paid to Scandinavian achievements in modernism, and the example of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was held out for its humanism, warmth and formal variety.

Modernism, as its name implies, was expressly predicated on a certain cultural amnesia, rejecting the legacy of past centuries as irrelevant to contemporary cultural conditions. In postwar Europe, this ideology served the appropriate political goal of creating a progressive cultural identity, one based largely on science and commerce and free of the taint of the abhorrent ideological regimes and mass destruction of the 1940s. The UNESCO Headquarters (1953-1958), for example, clearly introduced the clean lines of modernism into the still somewhat suspicious milieu of Paris as a politically neutral mode of building that spoke of internationalism, technological rationalism and optimistic reconstruction as the leitmotivs of postwar Europe. At this time the first skyscrapers began to rise in European cities, some—like Ponti and Nervi’s Pirelli building in Milan (1956-1959) or Jacobsen’s SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen (1959-60)—achieving a uniquely urbane and elegant articulation. From the 1970s, however, European architects began to recognise the need for a renewed engagement with the past, if not a full-blown revival. Italy, as represented by Carlo Scarpa and Aldo Rossi, again showed the way, proposing an abstracted but sometimes eerie re-imagining of Classical motifs and typologies. The Venice Biennale of 1980, which for the first time proposed an architectural section, seemed to encapsulate the moment in an exhibition entitled ‘The Presence of the Past’: here a number of prominent architects exhibited designs for building façades, many making creative use of Classical motifs. In England, the Postmodern recapitulation of architectural history was then taken a step further by such architects as Leon Krier and Quinlan Terry, who, with the support of Prince Charles, launched a crusade to restore traditional materials and methods of building, if not a wholesale Classical revival. For the most part, however, European architects have continued to work in a modernist vein, validating abstract forms, unprecedented typologies and the newest building technologies. The most successful European architects in recent years, as represented by Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas, embrace many of the lessons of postwar modernism, and if their latest work has become increasingly large-scale, even to the point of a potential dehumanisation, this is perhaps the inevitable result of population growth and the need to rationally accommodate the flow of very large and highly mobile volumes of people in public and commercial buildings that are multi-purpose and mega-structural in character.