A Journey Through Times and Cultures? Ancient Greek Forms in American Nineteenth-Century Architecture: An Archaeological View

The presence of classical architectural features in modernWestern architecture shows that knowledge from ancient timeswas travelling through both space and time. Yet despite surfacesimilarities, the architecture of revival was very different to that ofantiquity. The classicistic architecture of nineteenth-centuryAmerica provides a clear case. In contrast to the Romaninfluences that affected the founding fathers, nineteenth centuryAmerican architecture borrowed instead from the Greeks.Informed less by archaeology and more by ideology, theAmerican Greek revival saw the architectural forms divested oforiginal meanings and invested with the ideals of postrevolutionaryAmerica. Looking at the vectors by which the revivalreached American shores shows a double distortion affecting thetransmission of the signal from Ancient Greece, such that whatsurvives the great distances and times that separate the twosocieties is in the end a very different set of facts.[...]