The Spanish Colonial Revival Style is a United States architectural stylistic movement arising in the early 20th century based on the Spanish Colonial architecture of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
The Panama-California Exposition of 1915 in San Diego, highlighting the work of architect Bertram Goodhue, is credited with giving the style national exposure. Embraced principally in California and Florida, the Spanish Colonial Revival movement enjoyed its greatest popularity between 1915 and 1931.
The antecedents of the Spanish Colonial Revival Style can be traced to the Mediterranean Revival architectural style. For St. Augustine, Florida, three northeastern architects, New Yorkers John Carrère and Thomas Hastings of Carrère and Hastings and Bostonian Franklin W. Smith, designed grand, elaborately detailed hotels in the Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Revival styles in the 1880s. With the advent of the Ponce de León Hotel (Carrère and Hastings, 1882), the Alcazar Hotel (Carrère and Hastings, 1887) and the Casa Monica Hotel (later Hotel Cordova) (Franklin W. Smith, 1888) thousands of winter visitors to 'the Sunshine State' began to experience the charm and romance of Spanish influenced architecture. These three hotels were influenced not only by the centuries-old buildings remaining from the Spanish rule in St. Augustine but also by The Old City House, constructed in 1873 and still standing, an excellent example of early Spanish Colonial Revival architecture.
Colonial Revival (also Neocolonial, Georgian Revival or Neo-Georgian) architecture was and is a nationalistic design movement in the United States. Part of a broader Colonial Revival Movement embracing Georgian and Neoclassical styles, it seeks to revive elements of architectural style, garden design, and interior design of American colonial architecture. (There may have been more than one such movement over the decades, each with the goal of reviving Georgian/Neoclassical architecture.)
The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 reawakened Americans to their colonial past. This movement gained momentum in the 1890s and was accelerated by the early 20th century advent of the automobile, which allowed ordinary Americans to visit sites connected with their heritage more easily than was possible than when travelling by rail.
Successive waves of revivals of British colonial architecture have swept the United States since 1876. In the 19th century, Colonial Revival took a formal style. Public interest in the Colonial Revival style in the early 20th century helped popularize books and atmospheric photographs of Wallace Nutting showing scenes of New England. Historical attractions such as Colonial Williamsburg helped broaden exposure in the 1930s.
Revivalism in architecture is the use of visual styles that consciously echo the style of a previous architectural era.
Modern-day revival styles can be summarized within New Classical Architecture, and sometimes under the umbrella term traditional architecture.