be better known. They, also, represent the full breadth
of 19th century revivalist spirit, a frenzy of architectural
statements of many persuasions. Classicism, represented
by Georgian and Regency architecture, with its clean
Palladian overtures, reflecting the stirring clarity of the
broad, simple truths of the 18th century's Age of Reason,
gave way, in the 19th century, to a plethora of revival styles
often placed cheek by jowl, in the same façade or interior,
a frenetic design composition every bit as frenetic as
the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution which
marked the period of most of the 19th century.
Highclere is at once Gothic, Italianate, Louis XIV, XV and
XVI, Elizabethan and modern. The last in the sense that
its design is a necessary precursor to a new Neoclassical
era, the International Style of modernism of the first half
of the 20th century. The house, also, and other buildings
of the same ilk, would do much to inform modernism of
the second half of the 20th century and well into the 21st.
HYLAND