Posterity has admired in the production of the first decades of the nineteenth century a homogeneity of style which is in fact even more illusory than that of earlier periods. Horrified by the chaos of later nineteenth-century eclecticism, two twentieth-century have praised architects and patrons of the years before and after 1800 for a consistency that was by no means really theirs. In some ways, and not unimportant ways, the history of architecture within the period covered by this volume seems to come full circle so that the Austrian art historian Emil Kaufmann could in 1933 write a book entitled _Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier_. Kaufmann did not live quite long enough to realize how far from the spheres and cubes of the Ledolcian ideal the revolutionary twentieth-century architect would move in these last years (see Chapter 23). Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp, completed in 1955 after Kaufmann’s death, seems more in accord with extreme eighteenth-century illustrations of the Picturesque than with characteristic monuments of Romantic Classicism (Plate 167). Yet in the early works of the American Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1890s and those of the German Mies van der Rohe twenty years later a filiation to early nineteenth-century Classicism can be readily traced; that tradition informed almost the entire production of the French Perret, a good deal of that of the German Behrens, and even some of the best late work of the Austrian Wagner (see Chapters 18-21). Forgetting for the moment the Picturesque, one may profitably set down here some of the characteristics that the aspirations and the achievements of the architects of 1800 share, or seem to share, with those of the architects of over a century later. The preference for simple geometrical forms and for smooth, plain surfaces is common to both, though the earlier men aimed at effects of unbroken mass and the later ones rather at an expression of hollow volume. The protestations of devotion to the ‘functional’ are similar, if as frequently sophistical in the one case as in the other. The preferred isolation of buildings in space is as evident in the ubiquitous temples of the early nineteenth century as in the towering slabs of the mid twentieth. Monochromy and even monotony in the use of homogeneous wall-surfacing materials and the avoidance of detail in relief is balanced in both periods by an emphasis on direct structural expression, whether the structure be the posts and lintels of a masonry colonnade or the steel or ferro-concrete members of a continuous space-cage. Finally, impersonality and, perhaps even more notably, ‘internationality’ of expression provided around 1800 a universalized sense of period rather than the flavours of particular nations or regions, just as they have done in the last forty years.