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Picturesque Building Styles The first serious challenge to the Classical architectural tradition in Utah was mounted by the Picturesque styles during the 1860s and 1870s. The Picturesque aesthetic, based upon irregularity of composition and embodied in such styles as the Gothic Revival and Italianate, was the architectural manifestation of American romanticism, which stressed spontaneity and emotion over control and reason. As the prevailing Classicism came to be considered artificial and unnatural, it was replaced by forms thought to be natural and therefore somehow more honest. Picturesque styles used building materials in ways that emphasized their textures and forms and that seemingly reduced the artifice of the builder. Designers stressed the aesthetic appeal of asymmetrical massing, verticality, the use of rich colors, and the application of complicated and often exaggerated decorative schemes. Harmony was not itself shunned, but the Picturesque concept of architecture was based upon an active tension between competing building elements rather than a simple order based upon proportion and symmetry.
