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Although Stephen Riou published widely on architecture and exhibited his designs publicly, he never executed a single building. His writings and sketches however, document a lifelong interest in the application of classical form to contemporary building. Trained as an architect in Geneva, Riou traveled throughout Greece and Italy in the 1750sm acting as a guide to Grand tourists and eventually meeting up with James "Athenian" Stuart and Charles Revett. He accompanied the pair to Athens, and he shared their goal of increasing public knowledge and acceptance of classical Greek architecture. To this end, he published The Grecian Orders of Architecture delineated and explained from the Antiquities of Athens in 1768 and dedicated it to James Stuart. This design appears in simplified form as Plate VI in the second volume of Grecian Orders as "The Design for a New Street in the City." With these designs he hoped to illustrate the adaptability of forms such as the pedimented façade and Doric colonnade to the building projects of London, in this instance the planned construction of a new street leading from the Mansion House to Moorgate. Riou's design maintains class distinctions even with the new city dwelling through architectural language: "the center house, and those at the extremities, are larger than all of the intervening ones" to indicate "a difference in the fortunes and rents of the citizens." With his incorporation of Grecian features into Palladian designs, Riou was at the forefront of the Greek revival movement.

Morna O'Neill

Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 141 cat. no. 119