Architectural styles change because societies change. Buildings are shaped by shifting fashions, beliefs and religions, by new ideas, technologies and materials, and by the economics of who can afford to build and why, according to the standard account of architectural history. Styles emerge from the history of a society itself, and when they change, they usually do so gradually, as architects learn and adapt to new ideas. Understanding those forces—rather than memorizing a timeline of period names—explains why buildings look the way they do, and why local building traditions so often diverge from the global styles documented in textbooks.
The Dynamic Forces Shaping Architectural Styles
Most architecture can be classified as a chronology of styles that change over time, reflecting changing fashions, beliefs and religions, or the emergence of new ideas, technology, or materials. At any given moment several styles may be fashionable simultaneously, and styles often spread to other places, so that a style at its source continues developing in new ways while other countries follow with their own twist. This is why a single era rarely produces a single look, and why imported styles rarely arrive unchanged.
Technology and materials act as the physical enablers of change. Over the course of the nineteenth century, following the birth of the Industrial Revolution, architecture changed significantly, becoming less concerned with the past and more experimental, given innovations in building materials and technology, as an art history teaching resource on architecture since 1900 explains. New materials did not merely decorate old forms; they made previously impossible forms buildable, and architects adapted gradually to what those innovations allowed.
Social Values and Cultural Shifts
Styles are cultural documents as much as technical ones. Because they reflect changing fashions, beliefs and religions, a society's ideals become legible in its buildings. The modernist movement illustrates how a value system can become an aesthetic: a teaching account of the Lever House in New York notes that when it was built, it stood out from the surrounding architectural fabric, remaining "autonomous" like a modernist artwork, while the older stone buildings around it looked, by contrast, old and dirty.
Corporate culture reinforced the shift. The Lever Company saw the value that innovative architecture could have for the firm, since its new building generated considerable publicity—and because Lever made soap, a product associated with cleanliness, sharpness and clarity, the sleek design reinforced the company's identity. A style, in other words, can be adopted not because a society collectively believes in it, but because it serves the image a powerful patron wants to project. Styles also change as reactions against previous excesses, which is one reason revival movements recur: each generation reinterprets, rather than simply inherits, the forms before it.
