Atlas of Architectural Styles

About the court

A cast court in your browser

In the nineteenth century museums filled whole halls with plaster casts of famous buildings, so students could study a Gothic portal and a Roman capital side by side without travelling. This atlas does the same with one house. It is re-moulded twelve times, once in each major style of Western architecture, so the differences jump out.

Every cast is drawn in code as a relief map: each moulding, column and window is a shape with its own depth. Your browser turns that map into plaster with WebGL, working out the light and the cast shadows of a lamp that follows your pointer. Shadows are how you read relief on a real street too: a deep cornice, a flat modern wall and a heavily rusticated base each throw a different kind of shadow.

The casts are composites. Each one is drawn after several real buildings, which are named on its page, and compressed into one front so that a single picture holds the key features. They are teaching models, not measured drawings.

Sources

Photographs

All photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under open licences. Thank you to the photographers.

Fonts: Prata by Cyreal and Work Sans by Wei Huang, both under the SIL Open Font License.