As architects began to look back at the history modernists had discarded, his interest grew in the neoclassicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
With their bridge between old and new like the Ruhlmann table's Deco interpretation of neoclassicism for actress Lorcia they don't suffer the "period look" of the midcentury and beyond.
But they also reveal Bulfinch's own prophetic sense of the massive volumes of space and stone that would define later neoclassicism, exemplified in the structures designed by Robert Mills for the nation's capital and in the South.