Italian architecture

Lore & Background

The first people in Italy to begin a sequence of designs were the Greeks and the Etruscans. Etruscan buildings were made from brick and wood, with few sites remaining, such as in Volterra and Perugia. Greek colonists in Magna Graecia built temples and theatres, with remains in Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily, including the UNESCO-listed Valle dei Templi. Roman architecture absorbed Greek and Etruscan influences, using vaults, arches, and advanced building materials for structures like the aqueducts of Rome, the Baths of Diocletian, and the Colosseum.

Reader's Guide

Italian architecture has widely influenced the world. Byzantine architecture, seen in St Mark's Basilica in Venice and churches in Sicily, kept Roman principles with flatter domes and gilded mosaics. Italy now leads in modernist and sustainable design with architects such as Renzo Piano and Carlo Mollino. Italianate architecture, popular abroad since the 19th century, describes foreign buildings in an Italian style, especially modelled on Renaissance architecture.

Did You Know?

• St Mark's Basilica in Venice is a well-known example of Italo-Byzantine architecture.
• The Valle dei Templi in Sicily is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with remains of Greek architecture.

Origins and the Rise of Novelty Architecture

Novelty architecture—sometimes called programmatic or mimetic architecture—refers to structures built in deliberately unusual shapes, typically to advertise a business or to echo a famous building. Unlike architectural follies, which are purely decorative, novelty architecture demands that the structure remain fully functional and usable. While isolated precursors existed earlier, such as the ambitious but ultimately unbuilt Elephant of the Bastille in Paris, the style truly took off in the United States during the 1930s. The proliferation of automobile travel created a new landscape of roadside stops, and builders seized the opportunity to make their establishments impossible to miss. New York's Statue of Liberty, with its accessible interior and role as a tourist destination, stands as an early hybrid of sculpture and monument that prefigured this trend. From that point forward, the combination of eccentric form and practical function became a defining feature of American commercial design, eventually spreading to other countries and giving rise to an entire category of landmark structures whose very strangeness ensures they are remembered.

Mimetic Design: When Buildings Become the Product

The most recognizable branch of novelty architecture is mimetic design, in which a building takes the literal shape of the goods it sells or the theme it celebrates. Along American highways, this produced a comical parade of structures: coffee shops molded into enormous coffee pots, hot dog stands shaped like a single oversized sausage, and fruit stands sculpted as giant oranges. Specific landmarks include Tail o' the Pup, a hot dog–shaped stand; Brown Derby, a restaurant in the form of a derby hat; and Bondurant's Pharmacy, built as a mortar and pestle. The Big Apple Restaurant rises 10.7 metres as a three-dimensional apple, while the Big Duck began life as a poultry store and now operates as a gift shop. The tradition extends well beyond food: Lucy the Elephant and the Longaberger Company's head office in the United States, the High-Heel Wedding Church in Taiwan, the Mr. Toilet House in South Korea, the Elephant Building in Thailand, and Germany's Wolfartsweier Cat Kindergarten and BMW Headquarters all demonstrate how mimetic form can carry a wide range of commercial and institutional identities.

Replica Landmarks and the Architecture of Imitation

A second major category of novelty architecture involves buildings that replicate or adapt famous landmarks from around the world. This approach is especially prevalent in casinos, hotels, shopping plazas, and amusement parks, where the playfulness of imitation is intended to add to their appeal. Macau's The Venetian features a replica of St Mark's Campanile. In China, the New South China Mall in Dongguan includes a 25-metre replica of the Arc de Triomphe, a copy of Venice's St Mark's Campanile, and a 2.1-kilometre canal with gondolas. Japan's Huis Ten Bosch theme park near Nagasaki recreates Dutch landmarks, while a Kansas City shopping plaza houses a half-sized replica of La Giralda in Sevilla.

Whimsy at the Community Scale: Water Towers, Tanks, and Giant Sculptures

At a smaller, more local level, novelty architecture manifests in water towers, storage tanks, and oversized sculptures that become the visual identity of a small town or roadside stop. Water towers, often the most prominent structure in a small community, have been shaped or decorated to resemble peaches, coffee pots, teapots, corn cobs, wine bottles, sauce bottles, fishing bobbers, and strawberries. Breweries and other businesses have similarly designed their holding tanks in the form of giant beer cans or other beverage containers. Beyond functional infrastructure, giant sculptures of ordinary items scaled to building size appear at roadside parks, attractions, and museums across Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States. These sculptures tend to represent local wildlife such as fish, regional plants like apples or pineapples, well-known local figures such as Paul Bunyan, branded food items like the candy bars at the former Curtiss Candy Company, sporting equipment including giant bats and tires, musical instruments such as guitars, clothing like oversized boots, and popular creatures including dinosaurs. Together, these structures transform everyday objects into civic symbols, ensuring that a small town or a simple roadside stop becomes a memorable destination in its own right.