European medieval architecture in North America

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Medieval architecture in North America is an anachronism. The age of exploration and European discovery of America marks the difference between the Middle Ages and the modern world.

Some structures in North America can however be classified as medieval, either by style of construction, by age or origin. In some rare cases these structures are seen as evidence on pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. Independent of whether one believes in the disputed pseudoscience, these buildings are of interest to American scholars of medieval architecture.

[edit] Pre-Columbian buildings

• L'Anse aux Meadows, a Norse settlement in Newfoundland. Foundations of eight structures, visible today only as mounds because they were reburied in a conservation effort. Includes modern reconstructions.

• Hvalsey Church, a Norse church in Greenland. Additional remains of Norse-era settlements.

[edit] Modern romanesque and gothic buildings

This lists contains buildings built in true Romanesque and gothic styles using medieval construction methods. It does not include 19th century and 20th century buildings of gothic revival or romanesque revival styles.

• Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City
• Washington National Cathedral (minimal steel and concrete used)

See also Gothic Revival architecture in Canada

[edit] Transported buildings

Medieval building that have been transported to North America in modern times.

• The Cloisters museum, New York City, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art housed in a complex integrating elements from several different medieval structures
• St. Bernard de Clairvaux Church in Florida
• Elements of a twelfth-century cloister from Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, a Romanesque portal, and a fifteenth-century chapel in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Part of a Romanesque cloister in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
• Chapelle de St Martin de Sayssuel, (St. Joan of Arc Chapel) Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Agecroft Hall, Richmond, Virginia
• Chapterhouse of the Abbey of Santa Maria de Ovila, under reconstruction at the Abbey of New Clairvaux, Vina, California
• A 1524 sidechapel from France in the Detroit Institute of Arts

Other later period buildings were also transported like the Cotswold Cottage, built in the early 1600s in Chedworth, Gloucestershire, England, now in The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, London, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677 is now in Fulton, Missouri. It includes a spiral staircase which probably dates to the 15th century.