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Mediterranean Revival

Mediterranean Revival Styles

Mission Revival

The Mission Revival style originated in southern California where, needless to say, there were plenty of late-18th-century missions left over from the days of Spanish colonialism. As 1876 approached, everyone in the United States became sentimental about the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution. In the East, this backward-looking impulse led to the recycling of Early American house forms and motifs in a new style that became known as Colonial Revival. In the West, it led to a new appreciation of the Spanish missions as models for a regional style of architecture.

From about 1880 through 1900 the Mission Revival Style gained in popularity. The California State Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago was designed in Mission Style. The publicity given to this building helped to spread the style all across the country. (Mission was the first architectural style to spread from west to east.)

Both the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railway adopted the Mission Revival style for train stations, resort hotels, and other rail-corridor buildings, essentially as an effort to "theme" the Southwest for eastern travelers. The phenomenal popularity of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel "Ramona" (published in 1884) also helped to create a collection of regional myths that stimulated the California tourist trade and spread the Mission style.

Mission Revival was closely related to the American Arts & Craft Movement.

By the end of World War I, Mission Revival had passed the peak of its popularity, being supplanted supplanted by the more academically correct Spanish Colonial Revival style.

This home is featured in the 1908 edition of Radford's Artistic Bungalows. This is a not-too-successful attempt to slap a few Mission Revival elements onto the basic form of the Craftsman Bungalow.

This Sears Honor-Bilt Home was offered in the 1926 edition of the catalog. Here the Mission Revival decorative elements are grafted onto the vernacular four-square form.

Mission Style Apartment Building, circa 1915

Mission Style Retail Building, circa 1915

An exemplar of Mission Revival Style, the Serra Museum in San Diego.