The period 1750 to 1870 was an era of changes and architectural evolution on all
fronts. Architects reflected the social ferment in both a return to the styles of past eras and a
highly innovative search for means of expressing new ways of thinking and living.
Archaeologist-architects like James Stuart and Nicholas Revett measured and drew the
classical buildings of Rome and Greece and carried their findings home for reuse in every sort
of structure, from church and house to garden ornament. Yet in the same era some architects
like …tienne-Louis BoullÈe and E.-E. Viollet-le Duc turned away from the past toward an
abstract architecture of the imagination and toward an architecture that would suggest to
twentieth-century architects how they might abandon historicism and evolve a new style for the
future