Georgian

Georgian is the classical style used in Britain, Ireland and the British colonies from about 1714 to 1830, named for kings George I to George IV. A typical Georgian house is a symmetrical brick or stone block with a central front door and windows of equal size in regular rows. The windows are vertical sliding sashes divided into small panes. The door often has a fanlight (a semicircular or fan-shaped window above it) and a small pediment or pair of columns, and a dentil cornice, a row of small square blocks, runs under the roof edge.

In Bath, John Wood the Elder designed the Circus (begun 1754), and his son John Wood the Younger built the Royal Crescent (1767-1774), 30 houses behind one curved front of 114 Ionic columns. Dublin's Merrion Square, laid out in 1762, is lined with red-brick Georgian terraces. In the American colonies, Harvard's Massachusetts Hall in Cambridge (1718-1720) and William Buckland's Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis, Maryland (1774) follow the same rules.

Georgian design grew out of English Palladianism, a revival of the villas and proportional rules of the 16th-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus (1715-1725), a book of engraved British building designs, and Lord Burlington's Chiswick House in London (1729) set the direction, and James Gibbs's work bridged the change from English Baroque. Pattern books carried the style to ordinary builders: William Halfpenny, active 1723-1755, published books that had American as well as British editions.

Through the 18th century the style was used for terraces, country houses, churches and college buildings in British and Irish cities and in the American colonies. From the 1760s Robert Adam introduced lighter interior ornament based on Roman decoration. After independence, American builders developed Adam's ideas into the Federal style. In Britain the Georgian period ended around 1830, after the Regency, and Victorian styles followed. Neo-Georgian in Britain and Colonial Revival in the United States revived its forms from the late 19th century.