The early 1890s saw a sudden change in Birmingham's dominant architectural style, as High Gothic gave way to a distinctive local school of Arts and Crafts architecture. Buildings came increasingly to be designed in an understated style that limited ornament and was based on traditional forms of local vernacular architecture, in Birmingham largely brick, roughcast and half-timbering. Design emphasised the simple and honest expression of the building's construction, highlighting structural elements such as the bonds of the brickwork, and often emphasising differences in the function of elements of the building through the deliberate creation of awkward juxtapositions and contrasts. Buildings often featured decorative elements such as furnishings, friezes or paintings by local artists and craftsmen – particularly by the Birmingham Group which formed around the Birmingham School of Art in the 1880s – considering these to be integral to the design of the building to form a "total work of art". The Arts and Crafts philosophy was an approach to design rather than a defined style, however, and the work of Arts and Crafts architects within Birmingham ranged from the eclectic and spectacular Elizabethan revival work of Crouch and Butler to the Methodist purism of Joseph Lancaster Ball; and from the politically radical austerity of Arthur Stansfield Dixon; to the mystically-charged symbolism of the work of William Lethaby.