Revivalism and Architecture: Referencing and Reworking History

This book is an original and focused academic examination of revivalism in architecture. It looks at how the past has and continues to shape our built environment and visual culture.

With contributions by leading scholars and emerging names across the disciplines of architecture, architectural history, history, and design, Revivalism and Architecture explains and challenges our understanding of the past’s impact―at times overt and at others nuanced and covert―upon later generations and geographic regions. There is no defined way to interpret revivalist works, including terminology (‘revival’, ‘modern’, and ‘neo‑’), and there is an easy tendency to consider revivalist works as derivative pastiche. This volume questions some lingering prejudice against certain revived styles such as the Victorian Tudor revival, and it evaluates revivalist works according to their own time and merit rather than against their sources. By doing so, this book offers new light on the various, sometimes complicated ways the past has impacted, and continues to impact later periods. Contributors examine overt revivalism, the dissemination of revivalist forms, ideas, and styles, and covert revivalism, here termed ‘academic revivalism’. They address how ‘the other’ was revived, as well as the significance of surface pattern to revivalism, and the socio‑economic, political, and artistic forces driving, inspiring, and governing revivalist practices.

The essays within Revivalism and Architecture offer innovative research‑based studies across architecture and applied design. They underline and enhance the awareness of revivalism’s broader context and utility, and thereby drive scholarship forwards in the ways revivalism is conceived and written about. This book also makes an innovative and lasting contribution to the field by underlining the relevance of studying the past to inform today’s students in art, architecture, and design schools.

Peter N. Lindfield is Senior Lecturer in Architectural History at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He has written extensively on the Gothic Revival, heraldry, forgery, and material culture, including the following monographs: Georgian Gothic (2016); Unbuilt Strawberry Hill (2022); and The Intimacies of George Shaw (2025). Additionally, Peter edited or co‑edited volumes including Writing Britain’s Ruins (2017); The Display of Arms (2019); Politics and the English Country House (2023); and The Marriage Bed of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York (2023).

Dan Talkes is Lecturer in Design and Construction at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. A recipient of the Welsh Gold Medal for Architecture, and an Accredited Conservation Architect (AABC), he is both an educator and practitioner, with a specialism in new architecture in historic contexts. Accordingly, questions of style appropriation and appropriateness infuse and inform both his practice and research, most particularly in his long‑standing role as Heritage Consultant, Conservation Architect and Design Advisor to the medieval and neo‑medieval St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol.