"A Style of Our Time" - in the first half of the 19th c.

"More than anything, the architectural discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century was conditioned by the problem of self-expression: how to conceive and craft a 'style of our time.'
...
The debate rested on two related assumptions. First, it relied on a notion of style understood as the relative character of time and place. Second, it presupposed that history could be seen as a succession of epochs that evolve according to laws and manifest themselves by means of style."

Mari Hvattum
Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism
pp. 149-150