Styles in Stone: The World's Architectural Styles in Wikidata, Mapped Through Time

Architectural styles belong to times and places, and then travel. I map the architectural styles recorded in Wikidata for 180,451 buildings and structures with coordinates, which carry 1,314 different style labels. I group the labels into 25 families with a mapping table checked by hand for every style used by 20 or more buildings (covering 99% of style statements), flag revival styles, and place the 86,148 dated buildings (48%) in centuries. The textbook sequence emerges from the data unprompted: Romanesque is 63% of dated buildings from the 1100s, Gothic 72% of the 1300s, Renaissance 43% of the 1500s, Baroque and Rococo 51% of the 1700s, and revival styles make up 42% of the 1800s. Gothic Revival, with 10,776 buildings in 97 countries, can be followed from Britain (first tenth of precisely dated buildings begun by 1832) to Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand. Neoclassical, the largest family, is the most common family in 6 of 53 national capitals with enough buildings to compare. The record is very uneven: the United States and Spain hold 43% of the buildings, Europe 68% and Africa 0.4%, and about a fifth of dates are century-precision values. The atlas maps what Wikidata knows, and is explicit about what it does not. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/architecture-styles/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/architecture-styles. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/architecture-styles/.