Historicist architecture revives and recombines elements from past styles — Renaissance palazzi, Gothic cathedrals, Baroque churches, Moorish palaces — often within a single building. The style dominated 19th-century European architecture, when new building types (train stations, parliaments, museums) sought legitimacy by borrowing the formal language of established traditions.
Historicism is the architecture of cultural aspiration: a stock exchange dressed as a Greek temple, a railway station wearing a Gothic cathedral's facade. The style's eclecticism — mixing periods and sources freely — distinguishes it from the more disciplined revivals (Neoclassicism, Neo-Gothic) that preceded it.
