History of Architecture: Five Thousand Years of Answers

In the twelfth century, masons began raising Notre-Dame de Paris (1163), Khmer builders were finishing Angkor Wat, Ethiopian stonecutters were chiselling churches downward out of a hillside at Lalibela, and builders on Pohnpei, in Micronesia, were stacking basalt logs into the walls of Nan Madol on artificial islets. Nobody in any of those places had heard of the others.

That is the first thing a history of architecture teaches, and the first thing most schools used to get wrong: the story is not one road from Egypt to Greece to Rome to Paris to New York. It is many roads, some of which never met, and the same problems turned up on all of them. This piece takes the problems as its spine. It covers the whole world from the first monuments to about 1900; Modern & Contemporary Architecture (34/92) takes over from the Bauhaus.

Every culture started with what was at hand

Early builders did not choose a style; they used the nearest thing. Mud where there was mud, timber where there were forests, stone where it came out of the ground in blocks. The material pushed the form: mud brick (adobe) slumps unless it is thick and sheltered from rain, which gives the thick, rounded, plastered shapes of the Sahel. Timber is light and good in tension, and makes the great frames of East Asia. Stone is strong in compression, brittle in tension and heavy, and makes walls, columns and arches.

The Great Pyramid at Giza (c. 2560 BCE), Stonehenge's sarsen circle (c. 2500 BCE), the planned drains of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley (mature phase c. 2600 to 1900 BCE) and the temple mounds at Caral in Peru (c. 2600 BCE) all stand within a few centuries of each other, on four continents. Drag the year below to see what was being raised, around the world, at any moment. It shows only a short list of 34 famous buildings, so treat the empty rows as a gap in the list, not in history.

Span: the arch turns a push into a squeeze

The hardest problem in building is covering a gap. A flat stone beam over a gap bends, and stone is weak when pulled. The arch's trick is to make the stone press on itself: each block leans on its neighbours, and the whole curve is in compression, which stone loves. The price is that the arch pushes outward as well as down. That sideways push, the thrust, has to be caught by a buttress, a thick wall, a tie or the next arch. The history of masonry is the history of managing it.

The Romans learned to make vaults and domes from concrete. The Pantheon in Rome, dedicated around 126 CE, has a dome 43.3 m across inside, and it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Constantinople's Hagia Sophia (537 CE) set a dome on pendentives over a vast nave. Gothic builders in twelfth-century France pointed the arch and moved the buttress outside the wall as a flying buttress, letting the walls become glass. The Florentine dome (1436) closed a span of roughly the Pantheon's size with two shells and a brick pattern that let it rise with little wooden centring. In Istanbul, Sinan answered Hagia Sophia with the Süleymaniye Mosque (1557). Elsewhere the same problem got different answers: the Khmer and Maya corbelled stone inward course by course, and the Ellora builders carved the Kailasa temple out of a hillside (8th century) so there was no span to cover at all.

For a uniform load on a parabolic arch of span L and rise f, statics gives the thrust at each foot in one line:

The sideways push is the span divided by eight times the rise. Make the arch flatter and the thrust climbs. Try it.

A semicircle (rise half the span) gives a thrust of a quarter of the load; flatten it to a fifth of the span and it is 0.625 of the load (L ÷ 8f, with f = L/5). This is why Roman arches are round, why a nearly flat arch needs huge abutments, and why a pointed arch, which pushes outward less than a round one of the same span, let Gothic builders put up such tall thin walls. It is also exactly the situation in Statics (34/10): a push and a reaction that must balance.

A module is a shared language

A mason's apprentice in Greece, a carpenter in Song China and a tatami maker in Kyoto all solved the same coordination problem: how do dozens of people, working at different times, make parts that fit? The answer was a module: pick one dimension and make everything a multiple of it.

The Greek and Roman orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) are a module system as much as a style: the column's diameter sets its height, its capital and the beam it carries. The Roman writer Vitruvius, whose De architectura is the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, recorded such rules, and Vignola's Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (1562) turned them into a handbook, based on a module of half a column diameter. In that Renaissance canon a Doric column is eight diameters tall, an Ionic nine and a Corinthian ten, though ancient Greek Doric columns were stouter, from four to eight diameters depending on the building.

China wrote the module into law. The Yingzao Fashi (1103), compiled by the Song official Li Jie, sorted timber sections into eight standard grades, with every other dimension of a timber hall derived from the grade chosen. The size of the chosen grade set the scale of the whole building, so a larger hall simply used a bigger grade. The values of the eight grades are still debated by scholars; the idea is not.

The same logic runs through the Japanese tatami room, which you met in Form, Space & Order (34/89), and through Islamic geometric design, where a pattern is generated from a circle and a compass. The module is why a medieval cathedral built over a century by different crews still holds together. It is also why a modern shipping container, a standard brick (which fits a hand) and a sheet of plywood (1.22 × 2.44 m, or 4 × 8 feet) all shape the buildings around them.

Climate was the first engineer

Before air conditioning, a building had to keep its occupants alive using only its shape and its material. Builders found different answers in different climates, and none of them needed a machine. Courtyard houses, from Chinese siheyuan to the Roman atrium house, pull cool night air into a shaded well. The wind-catchers (badgir) of desert cities such as Yazd in Iran funnel breezes down into the house. Stilted timber houses in the humid tropics catch the air under the floor. Thick earthen walls in the Sahel, like those of the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali (rebuilt in 1907 on the site of earlier mosques, and replastered by the community every year), do something subtler.

A thick wall acts like a battery for heat. When the sun beats on its outside face, the warmth soaks inward slowly, and by the time it arrives on the inside it is weaker and later. In the simple textbook model of a solid wall driven by a daily temperature swing, the swing shrinks by a factor of e^−x/δ and arrives (x/δ) ÷ 2π of a day late, where x is the thickness and δ = √(αP ÷ π) is the distance over which the daily wave fades, α is the material's thermal diffusivity and P is 24 hours. A 40 cm adobe wall can leave the inside barely warmer by day and keep it from chilling at night. Set the material and thickness below.

A caution against a lazy reading: vernacular does not always mean wise. Many traditional buildings were uncomfortable, and many modern ones in hot places copy glass boxes from cold ones and then cool them at huge cost. The lesson is narrower: where the materials, the climate and the way of life were matched over generations, the result often performs very well, and it is worth understanding before it is replaced. Environmental Systems in Buildings (34/94) puts numbers on exactly this.

Buildings as power, belief and memory

The tallest and most durable buildings are almost never houses. They are what a society wanted to last: temples, tombs, palaces, forts. The materials are an economic statement, and the form a political one. Angkor Wat, begun by King Suryavarman II in the early twelfth century, was dedicated to Vishnu and later became a Buddhist site, in use to this day. Great Zimbabwe's Great Enclosure, built mainly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the ancestors of the Shona, has dry-stone walls up to about 11 m high with no mortar. Colonial-era writers refused for decades to believe that Africans had built it; archaeologists settled the matter in the twentieth century.

Machu Picchu, a royal estate from the time of the emperor Pachacuti (mid-fifteenth century), is built of precisely cut stone laid without mortar, in a land of earthquakes. The Taj Mahal (1632 to about 1653), the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, shows a power that could command marble, craftsmen and a whole garden plan. Ise Shrine in Japan answers the permanence question in the opposite way: the main buildings are dismantled and rebuilt to the same design on an adjacent site every twenty years, a ritual followed since the seventh century (the 62nd rebuilding was in 2013). What lasts is not the timber but the knowledge of how to build it.

All of these dates are from standard sources and several are approximate: scholars argue about when Lalibela's churches were carved (most put it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), when work on the Pantheon began, and who built what at many early sites. Test your sense of the order with the game below. Nearly everyone guesses wrong at least once.

Iron, glass and the end of masonry's monopoly

For five thousand years a tall or wide building meant thick walls. Between about 1780 and 1890, that rule broke. Cast and then wrought iron, and from the 1850s mass-produced steel, let builders carry load on a slim frame. The Ditherington Flax Mill in Shrewsbury (1797) had an iron frame inside brick walls, in order to resist fire. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London was an iron and glass hall assembled from standard parts in months. The Eiffel Tower (1889) showed that an iron lattice could reach 300 m.

In Chicago, William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building (completed 1885) carried much of its weight on a metal skeleton and is often called the first skyscraper, though that title is disputed and earlier iron-framed buildings exist. Along with Elisha Otis's safe elevator, which made the upper floors worth renting, the frame turned the wall from a structure into a skin. That is the doorway to the next piece in the series.

Whose history? How the story got told

The way a subject is taught is itself history. The standard English textbook for over a century, Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1896), opened with a "Tree of Architecture" in which European styles formed the strong trunk and branches, and non-Western traditions were drawn as stunted lower branches. Later editions were criticised for this and the book was eventually retitled as a global history, though scholars still debate how far it was corrected. Newer textbooks, such as Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash's A Global History of Architecture (3rd edition, 2017), organise their chapters along a common timeline across regions, which is exactly what the slider above does.

The lesson for a student is practical. When a textbook says "primitive" or "vernacular" it is usually describing its own distance from the building, not the building. And when you stand in a mud-brick mosque, a rock-cut church or a timber shrine, you are looking at a mature answer to a real problem, with a century of refinement behind it.

What a graduate just sees

• Architecture history is many roads, not one; the same problems recur on every continent.
• Material decides form: mud, timber and stone each want a different building.
• An arch is in compression, and it pushes sideways; the flatter the arch, the bigger the thrust (H = wL² ÷ 8f).
• A module (a column diameter, a timber grade, a tatami mat) is how many hands make parts that fit.
• A thick, heavy wall delays and flattens the daily heat wave; builders used this long before the equation.
• Monuments are statements: power, belief, memory; a building can last by being rebuilt.
• Iron, glass and steel turned the wall from structure into skin only in the last 150 years.
• Every textbook chooses its trunk and its branches; check whose history you are reading.

Where it shows up next

• Modern & Contemporary Architecture (34/92): starts where this piece stops, with the Bauhaus and the steel frame's consequences.
• Statics (34/10) and Structural Analysis (34/64): the arch thrust and the line of force are the first lesson of both.
• Materials Science & Manufacturing (34/13): adobe, timber, stone and cast iron each had their own failure, which that course explains.
• Environmental Systems in Buildings (34/94) and Heat Transfer (34/16): the thick-wall delay is conduction in a wall, solved properly.
• In the real world: heritage conservation, a restoration architect deciding which repair is honest, and anyone designing in a climate with a vernacular they should learn from first.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Standard texts: Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, A Global History of Architecture (Wiley, 3rd edition, 2017), the survey many schools assign for its global range. Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture, now a global history (its recent editions are published by Routledge and Bloomsbury), is the classic reference, best used as a dictionary.
• 📘 Gentler: the library's How to Read a Building (08/10) and Art Beyond the West (08/09), for how to look before you read.
• 🌐 Free course: MIT OpenCourseWare 4.605, Introduction to the History and Theory of Architecture (Prof. Mark Jarzombek, Spring 2012, covering world architecture from prehistory to the sixteenth century).