what it is
Egyptian Revival architecture copies features of ancient Egyptian temples and tombs. Walls are battered, meaning they slope inward as they rise, and entrances are often set in a pylon, a gateway flanked by two tapering towers. The top of the wall usually ends in a cavetto cornice, a concave curved molding. Columns have capitals carved as lotus flowers or bundles of papyrus, and a winged sun disk is often carved over the door. Obelisks, sphinxes and hieroglyph-style carving appear as ornament.
Examples include the granite gate of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1843), Henry Austin's gate for Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven (1845), the Egyptian Building of the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond (1845), and Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood (1922). Greek Revival buildings of the same decades have vertical walls, triangular pediments and Doric or Ionic columns; Egyptian Revival buildings have sloping walls, cavetto cornices and capitals shaped like plants.
how to spot one
history
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 brought scholars and artists who recorded its monuments. Vivant Denon published an illustrated account of the expedition in 1802, and the French government's Description de l'Egypte appeared in volumes over more than twenty years from 1809. The Karlsruhe Synagogue (1798) was an early large Egyptian-style building, and Peter Frederick Robinson's Egyptian Hall in London opened in 1812. In the United States, the first example was the synagogue of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia (1824), followed by cemetery gates, medical schools and the prison in New York known as the Tombs (1838).
A second wave followed Howard Carter's discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922. Egyptian motifs entered Art Deco design, and in the United States a series of Egyptian-themed movie theaters was built, including the Egyptian Theatre in Boise, Idaho (1927), whose lotus-bud columns were modeled on those at Karnak. Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood had opened a few weeks before the discovery, in October 1922.
where to find it
Cemetery gates like Mount Auburn in Cambridge and Grove Street in New Haven, Masonic halls, and the surviving Egyptian theaters in Hollywood and Boise.
