ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the beginnings of American architecture from the seventeenth into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, witness American history dramatically playing out in the buildings of each of the eras of American architecture. How did this revolution in America generate a new architecture that sprang from invention and innovation? As the Enlightenment spread, so too did the impetus for independent thinking. By the seventeenth century, the emergence of the power of the aristocracy put in motion the secularization of architecture in the palaces of France and palazzos of Florence, proclaiming the influence of the royals throughout Europe. There arose philosophers, Savaronola among them, who helped shape the city, and Machiavelli, who became the father of political science and perhaps one of the greatest political plotters of all time. Toscarelli helped Brunelleschi paint the Baptistery of the Duomo in accurate perspective, which was a method of imaging heretofore unknown in the medieval world.
