The opening of Introduction
THE round numbers of chronology have no necessary significance historically. Centuries as cultural entities often begin and end decades before or after the hundred-year mark. The years around 1800, however, do provide a significant break in the history of architecture, not so much because of any major shift in style at that precise point as because the Napoleonic Wars caused a general hiatus in building production. The last major European style, the Baroque, had been all but dissolved away in most of Europe. The beginnings of several differing kinds of reaction against it—Academic in Italy, Rococo in France, Palladian in England—go back as far as the first quarter of the century; shortly after the mid century there came a more concerted stylistic revolution.