H(enry) H(obson) Richardson - Images

Architect, born in Priestley Plantation, Louisiana, USA. He graduated from Harvard (1859) and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He returned to open his practice in New York in 1866, and formed an early partnership (1867–78) with Charles Dexter Gambrill, designing chiefly churches. His design for Trinity Church, Boston (1872–7) won him national recognition. Practising independently after 1878 in Brookline, MA, he designed a number of small suburban libraries and railroad stations, Harvard residence halls, commercial buildings, and private houses, and collaborated on the New York State Capitol, Albany (1876–86). His final works were the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh (1883–8), and the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Chicago (1885–7), completed by assistants after Richardson's death. His designs progressively refined Romanesque forms into a style termed Richardsonian, inspiring the American Romanesque revival. He was widely influential also through his sensitive handling of materials, his mastery of interior decoration, and his introduction of the Queen Anne style to America, as in William Watts Sherman House, Newport, RI (1874–6). He trained a generation of architects, including John Galen Howard, Charles McKim, George Shepley, and Stanford White. Some scholars rate him as the greatest architect of his age.

If a single work of Richardson's had to be selected over others it would have to be Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston (1872-1877), part of one of the outstanding American urban complexes, across from the Boston Public Library by Charles Follen McKim, Richardson's former draftsman, confronted by the Hancock Place office tower by I.

A series of small public libraries donated by patrons for the improvement of New England towns makes a small coherent corpus that defines Richardson's style: libraries in Woburn, North Easton (illustration, right), Malden, Massachusetts, and the very fine Thomas Crane Public Library (Quincy, Massachusetts).

Other works that may be familiar:

Sever Hall, Harvard University (1880), brickwork, with molded brick string courses with turrets embedded in the walls, strips of windows, under a huge hipped roof The Allegheny County Courthouse, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, (1883 - 1888) connected by a bridge to its jail across the narrow street: cyclopean masonry and a tall tower Marshall Field warehouse, Chicago, Illinois (1887) -[demolished 1930], graded variations in rusticated stonework, vast windowed arcading spanning three floors, with not a historical detail in sight Buffalo's New York State Asylum (1870), shown on the left, was the largest building of the master's career and the first to display his characteristic style.

Richardson's legacy is less in the styles of Stanford White and Charles Follen McKim, who each worked in his office as young men, but moved into a different, historicist Beaux-Arts mode, as it is in Louis Sullivan, who developed highly personal non-historic surface decoration and passed on to his student, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardsonian lessons of texture, massing, and the expressive language of stone walling.

Following Richardson's early death in 1886 at age 48, the style that he had pioneered was picked up by a variety of other architects whose works are grouped under the name of Richardsonian Romanesque.

Images

Brattle Square Church, Boston, MA, sculpture by Bartholdi – who did the Statue of Liberty	Albany, NY, City Hall	Albany, NY, City Hall, detail	Albany, NY, City Hall, detail
Allegheny County Court House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania	Allegheny County Court House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, interior courtyard	Allegheny County Court House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania	Chaney Building, Hartford, CT
Gate House, North Easton, MA	Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, North Easton, MA	Glessner House, Chicago, IL	Allegheny County Court House, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bridge to prison
Robert Treat Paine Estate, Waltham, Massachusetts	Library, North Easton, Massachusetts	Library, Woburn, Massachusetts	Thomas Crane Public Library (Quincy, Massachusetts)
The Inner Quad at Stanford University