Romanesque Revival

Romanesque Revival buildings use the round arch of 11th- and 12th-century European churches. Doors, windows and arcades have semicircular tops, windows are often grouped in pairs or threes under a larger arch, and rows of small arches run under the eaves. Walls are brick or stone, churches often have twin towers, and carving is limited to moldings and capitals (the tops of columns). The German version, the Rundbogenstil or round-arch style, mixes Romanesque with Byzantine and early Renaissance forms.

Friedrich von Gärtner's Ludwigskirche in Munich (1829-1844) has two towers 71 meters high. In the United States, Richard Upjohn's Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn (1844-1846) is considered the first Romanesque Revival building, and James Renwick Jr.'s Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington (1849-1855), built of red sandstone, mixes Romanesque and Gothic forms. Alfred Waterhouse's Natural History Museum in London (1873-1881) is faced in terracotta. Richardsonian Romanesque, a later American variant, uses rough-faced stone and squat columns.

The revival began in the German states in the 1820s and 1830s, when architects looked for an alternative to both Greek classicism and Gothic. Heinrich Hübsch's 1828 essay In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (In what style should we build?) argued for round-arched building. Friedrich von Gärtner used it for the Ludwigskirche and other buildings on Munich's Ludwigstraße for King Ludwig I, and between 1835 and 1870 the Rundbogenstil was used for railway stations in Berlin, Munich and Leipzig. In Britain, the Norman Revival produced Thomas Hopper's Penrhyn Castle in Wales (1820-1837).

German immigrants and German architecture books carried the style to the United States, where Upjohn's Church of the Pilgrims and Renwick's Smithsonian building appeared in the 1840s. It was used for churches, college buildings and synagogues such as Gates of Heaven in Madison, Wisconsin (1863). In the 1870s H. H. Richardson developed his own version, starting with Trinity Church in Boston (1872-1877). After the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, classical designs replaced it for most public buildings, though churches kept Romanesque forms, as in Washington's Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, begun in 1920.