Gothic Revival

Gothic Revival

Gothic Revival: façade of house

A movement originating in the 18th century and culminating in the 19th century, flourishing throughout Europe and the United States, aimed at reviving the spirit and forms of Gothic forms; applied to country cottages, churches, some public buildings, and castlelike structures. Gothic Revival buildings usually are characterized by ashlar masonry, polychromed brickwork, or wood walls, often extending into the gables without interruption; Gothic motifs such as battlements, decorative brackets, finials, foils, foliated ornaments, hood moldings, label moldings, pinnacles, pointed arches, towers, turrets; often, a porch with flattened Gothic or Tudor arches; a symmetrical façade; steeply pitched gables often decorated with ornate gingerbread bargeboards; projecting eaves; decorative slate or shingle patterns on the roof; occasionally, a flat roof with crenelated and castellated parapets; ornamental chimney stacks and chimney pots; a cast-iron decorative strip at the ridge of the roof; windows extending into the gables; often, an elaborately paneled front door set into a lancet arch; the entry door sometimes within a recessed porch or under a door hood, occasionally bordered with sidelights. The initial phase is sometimes calledEarly Gothic Revival ; the latter phase is sometimes calledLate Gothic Revival or Victorian Gothic. Also see Collegiate Gothic, High Victorian Gothic, and Carpenter Gothic.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Gothic Revival

 

an architectural style of the 18th and 19th centuries, reviving forms and, in a number of instances, structural elements of medieval Gothic architecture. The origin of Gothic revival (particularly in England, where traditions of Gothic art were strongest) is associated with the flourishing of garden art, the development of tastes for the picturesque, and, in literature, the preromantic poetization of the medieval (especially typical of the Gothic novel, which influenced the formation of European romanticism).

Early Gothic revival structures include artificial ruins, pavilions, chapels, and villas. An interest in the national past, stirred by romanticism, and the appearance of archaeological publications on monuments of medieval architecture facilitated the transformation of the Gothic revival into one of the most influential currents of 19th-century eclectic architecture (in England, the architects A. Pugin and C. Barry; in Germany, the architect K. F. Schinkel).

The Gothic style dominated Catholic and Protestant church architecture and was increasingly used for civic buildings. One widespread type of Gothic revival monument had a baldachin. Monuments of medieval architecture were reconstructed and restored. In Russia the Gothic revival was initially developed in the construction of country estates (architects included Iu. M. Fel’ten and the brothers I. V. Neelov and P. V. Neelov). In the work of the architects V. I. Bazhenov and M. F. Kazakov, Gothic elements were combined with motifs of medieval Russian architecture. In Europe the Gothic revival of the second half of the 19th century was characterized by the extensive use of iron structures and polychromy (in England, the architects W. But-terfield, G. G. Scott, G. Street, and A. Waterhouse; in France, E. E. Viollet-le-Duc). The striving to re-create the characteristically Gothic integrity of artistic thinking (expressed in the works of J. Ruskin, W. Morris, and Viollet-le-Duc) and the recognition of the aesthetic value of frame construction were aspects of the Gothic revival that not only became components of art nouveau and neoromantic currents of the end of the 19th century but also significantly influenced the emergence of 20th-century functionalism.

REFERENCES

Kozhin, N. A. “K genezisu russkoi lozhnoi gotiki.” Akademiia arkhitektury, 1934, nos. 1–2, pp. 114–21.
Frankl, P. The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries. Princeton, N. J., 1960.
Clark, K. The Gothic Revival. Harmondsworth, 1964.
Eastlake, C. L. A History of the Gothic Revival. Leicester, 1970.

M. N. SOKOLOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.