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Style
What named idiom does it follow?
Where this axis ends
A style is a named idiom with formal rules and a literature. The test: could a designer execute it deliberately from a set of moves, and could you write those moves down? Minimalism passes. Cosy fails, because it is an outcome rather than a method.
25 terms
| Term | Identifier | Definition | Broader | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimalism | style.minimalism | Reduction to the fewest elements that will do the job, with the reduction itself legible as the design decision. | None | occasional |
| Modernism | style.modernism | The early-to-mid twentieth century movement: form led by function, structure left legible, ornament refused on principle. | None | - |
| Mid-Century Modern | style.mid_century_modern | The postwar domestic reading of modernism: organic curves, teak and walnut, tapered legs, warm rather than austere. | Modernism | - |
| Contemporary | style.contemporary | The prevailing current idiom: clean-lined, unornamented, neither period-referencing nor doctrinally modernist. | None | dominant |
| Traditional | style.traditional | Pre-modern decorative conventions carried forward without irony: mouldings, pattern, symmetry, furniture with a period lineage. | None | dominant |
| Neoclassical | style.neoclassical | The classical orders applied with archaeological seriousness: proportion systems, columns, entablature, strict symmetry. | Traditional | - |
| Gothic | style.gothic | Pointed arch, rib vault, verticality, tracery, structure expressed as ornament. | None | - |
| Art Deco | style.art_deco | Stepped and faceted geometry, lacquer, brass and mirror, luxury materials worked into machine-age forms. | None | - |
| Industrial | style.industrial | Structure and services left exposed, ex-utility fabric kept rather than concealed, finishes that read as unfinished. | None | - |
| Brutalism | style.brutalism | Mass concrete left as struck, monumental massing, the construction method visible as the finish. | None | - |
| Maximalism | style.maximalism | Deliberate accumulation: pattern on pattern, colour on colour, more held together on purpose rather than by accident. | None | - |
| Eclectic | style.eclectic | Periods and idioms mixed by intent, with the mixing itself as the method. Distinct from maximalism, which is about quantity rather than provenance. | None | common |
| Transitional | style.transitional | The deliberate midpoint between traditional and contemporary: period silhouettes stripped of ornament, or contemporary forms softened with classical proportion. | None | common |
| Rustic | style.rustic | Rough-hewn construction shown rather than hidden: sawn timber, undressed stone, hand tools legible in the surface. | None | - |
| Vernacular | style.vernacular | Built in the local traditional manner, using what the place supplies. Carries no content on its own - it needs a place to be a style, which is why it composes with PLACE rather than duplicating it. | None | - |
| Critical Regionalism | style.critical_regionalism | Modernism deliberately inflected by local climate, material and craft, as a resistance to placelessness. Distinct from vernacular: it is a modernist position about place, not the local tradition itself. | None | - |
| Wabi-Sabi | style.wabi_sabi | Imperfection, asymmetry and age treated as the value rather than tolerated. Distinct from rustic: rustic is about roughness of making, wabi-sabi is about acceptance of decay. | None | - |
| Bohemian | style.bohemian | Layered, collected and informal, drawing pattern and object from many cultures without resolving them into one scheme. | None | - |
| Postmodernism | style.postmodernism | Historical quotation used knowingly and often ironically; ornament readmitted as commentary. | None | - |
| Deconstructivism | style.deconstructivism | Fragmented geometry and apparent instability, with the disruption as the subject. | None | - |
| Parametricism | style.parametricism | Form generated by rule systems and continuously varied rather than composed element by element. | None | - |
| High-Tech | style.high_tech | Structure and services celebrated as the architecture, expressed with industrial precision. | None | - |
| Rationalism | style.rationalism | Geometric order and typological clarity taken as first principles, especially the Italian interwar and Tendenza readings. | None | - |
| Constructivism | style.constructivism | Early Soviet avant-garde: dynamic diagonal composition, exposed structural drama, architecture as social instrument. | None | - |
| Organic Modernism | style.organic_modernism | Modernism whose forms derive from natural growth and site rather than from the grid: continuous curves, building and ground treated as one. | Modernism | - |
Machine-readable
Every term on this axis is in the full dump: JSON-LD · Turtle