Henry Hobson Richardson,FAIA (September 29, 1838 – April 27, 1886) was an American architect, best known for his work in a style that became known asRichardsonian Romanesque. Along withLouis Sullivan andFrank Lloyd Wright, Richardson is one of "the recognized trinity of American architecture."[1]
Richardson went on to study atHarvard College andTulane University. Initially, he was interested in civil engineering, but shifted to architecture, which led him to go to Paris in 1860 to attend the famedÉcole des Beaux Arts in the atelier ofLouis-Jules André. He was only the second U.S. citizen to attend the École's architectural division—Richard Morris Hunt was the first[6]—and the school was to play an increasingly important role in training Americans in the following decades.
He did not finish his training there, as family backing failed due to theU.S. Civil War.[7]
Trinity Church, Boston (1872), is Richardson's most acclaimed early work
Richardson returned to the U.S. in 1865, settling in New York that October. He found work with a builder, Charles,[who?] whom he had met in Paris. The two worked well together but Richardson was not being challenged. He had little to do and yearned for more. With no work Richardson fell into a state of poverty looking for more work. One of his first commissions was theWilliam Dorsheimer House he built in 1868 forWilliam Dorsheimer (1832–1888) on Delaware Ave in Buffalo, NY, which is in the style of the Second Empire with aMansard roof. This important commission led to many other commissions. The style that Richardson developed over time, however, was not the more classical style of the École, but a more medieval-inspired style, influenced byWilliam Morris,John Ruskin andViollet le Duc.[8] Richardson developed a unique and highly personal idiom, adapting in particular theRomanesque of southern France. His early works, however, were not very remarkable. "There are few hints in the mediocre work of Richardson's early years of what was to come in his maturity, when, beginning with his competition-winning design ... for the Brattle Square Church in Boston, he adopted the Romanesque."[9]
In 1869, he designed theBuffalo State Asylum for the Insane (now known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex) in Buffalo, the largest commission of his career and the first appearance of Richardsonian Romanesque style. A massiveMedina sandstone complex, it is aNational Historic Landmark and, as of 2009, was being restored.[10]
Trinity Church in Boston, designed by Richardson and built 1872–1877, solidified his national reputation and led to major commissions for the rest of his life. Although incorporating historical elements from a variety of sources, including early Syrian Christian,Byzantine, and both French andSpanish Romanesque, it was more "Richardsonian" than Romanesque.[11][12] Trinity was also a collaboration with the construction and engineering firm of theNorcross Brothers, with whom the architect would work on some 30 projects.
He designed theAmes Monument, which was constructed from 1880 to 1882, and is located at the highest point of the originalTranscontinental Railway (the financing of which was spearheaded byOliver Ames Jr. and his brotherOakes Ames), east ofLaramie,Wyoming. The Ames brothers and family provided generous patronage for Richardson's works, and after Oliver's death, Richardson was commissioned to design theAmes Free Library established in 1883 by a bequeath in Ames's will.
He was well-recognized by his peers; of ten buildings named by American architects as the best in 1885, fully half were his: besides Trinity Church, there wereAlbany City Hall, Sever Hall at Harvard University, theNew York State Capitol in Albany (as a collaboration), andOakes Ames Memorial Hall in North Easton, Massachusetts.
Despite the success of Trinity, Richardson built only two more churches, focusing instead on the monumental buildings he preferred, plus libraries, railroad stations, commercial buildings, and houses.[13] Of his buildings, the two he liked best, theAllegheny County Courthouse (Pittsburgh, 1884–1888) and theMarshall Field Wholesale Store (Chicago, 1885–1887, demolished 1930), were completed posthumously by his assistants.[14]
Richardson spent much of his later years in his house at 25 Cottage St. inBrookline, Massachusetts,[15] which had a studio attached.
Richardson died in 1886 at age 47 ofBright's disease.[16] On his last day, he signed an informal will directing the three assistants still remaining to carry on the business, which was soon formalized asShepley, Rutan and Coolidge.[17] One example includes Richardson's design for theGreater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce Building. Richardson had won the selection process in 1885 and nearly finalized the work, but after his death his successors completed the project.[18]
He was buried inWalnut Hills Cemetery,Brookline, Massachusetts. Despite an enormous income for an architect of his day, his "reckless disregard for financial order" meant that he died deeply in debt, leaving little to his widow and six children.[19]
Richardson's most acclaimed early work is Trinity Church.[9] The interior of the church is one of the leading examples of thearts and crafts aesthetic in the United States. It was at Trinity that Richardson first worked withAugustus Saint Gaudens, with whom he would work many times in the ensuing years. Across the square is theBoston Public Library, built later (1895) by Richardson's former draftsman,Charles Follen McKim. Together these and the surrounding buildings comprise one of the outstanding American urban complexes, built as the centerpiece of the newly developedBack Bay.
The largest building complex of HH Richardson's career,Richardson Olmsted Complex inBuffalo, New York, United States was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986. The first building to display his characteristic style the complex of buildings was designed in concert with the famed landscape team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in the late 1800s, incorporating a system of enlightened treatment for people with mental illness developed by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. Over the years, as mental health treatment changed and resources were diverted, the buildings and grounds began a slow deterioration. In 2006, the Richardson Center Corporation was formed with a mandate to save the buildings and bring the Campus back to life through a state appropriation.
Today, the Richardson Olmsted Campus is being transformed into a cultural amenity for the city. Arriving in 2018, the Richardson Olmsted Campus will also have the Lipsey Architecture Center of Buffalo. The remaining buildings have been stabilized pending future opportunities.
TheThomas Crane Public Library (Quincy, Massachusetts), with Japanese inspired eyelid dormers in the roof on each side of the entrance
Richardson pointedly claimed ability to create any type of structure a client wanted, insisting he could design anything "from a cathedral to a chicken coop."[20] "The things I want most to design are a grain elevator and the interior of a great river-steamboat."[13] However, architectural historianJames F. O'Gorman sees Richardson's achievement particularly in four building types: public libraries, commuter train station buildings, commercial buildings, and single-family houses.
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:Winn Memorial Library (Woburn),Ames Free Library (Easton), theConverse Memorial Library (Malden), and theThomas Crane Public Library (Quincy), (1880–1882) "generally regarded by architectural historians as the masterpiece of Richardson's libraries",[21] the Hubbard Memorial Library (Ludlow, Massachusetts), andBillings Memorial Library on the campus of theUniversity of Vermont.[22] These buildings seem resolutely anti-modern, with the atmosphere of an Episcopalian vicarage, dimly lit for solemnity rather than reading on site. They are preserves of culture that did not especially embrace the contemporary flood of newcomers to New England. Yet they offer clearly defined spaces, easy and natural circulation, and they are visually memorable. Richardson's libraries found many imitators in the "Richardsonian Romanesque" movement.
The Thomas Crane Public Library is regarded as the best of Richardson's libraries.[23][24][25] In his earlier libraries, Richardson's approach was to conceive the parts and then assemble them, while in the later ones such as Crane he thought in terms of the whole.[26] Richardson also engaged in a process of simplification and elimination with each successive library, until in Crane "Richardson's concentration on the relation of solid to void, of wall to window, becomes the basis for a harmonious abstraction with scarcely a reference to any past style."[24][27]
Richardson also designed ninerailroad station buildings for theBoston & Albany Railroad as well as three stations for other lines.[28] More subtle than his churches, municipal buildings and libraries, they were an original response to this relatively new building type. Beginning with his first at Auburndale (1881, demolished 1960s), Richardson drew inspiration for these station buildings fromJapanese architecture that he learned about fromEdward S. Morse, aHarvardzoologist who began traveling to Japan in 1877, originally for biological specimens. Falling in love with Japan, upon his return that same year Morse began giving illustrated "magic lantern" public lectures on Japanese ceramics, temples, vernacular architecture, and culture.[29] Richardson incorporated Japanese concepts "in both sihouette and spatial concept", including thekarahafu ("excellent gable", but generally poorly translated as "Chinese gable" despite its Japanese origin), the eyelid dormer, and the wide hip roof with extended eaves, all shown by Morse.[30]
Detail from Old Colony Railroad Station showing a dragon carved in the beam of a glazed Syrian arch
Among the few stations still extant, these influences are perhaps best illustrated in his Old Colony station (Easton, Massachusetts, 1881–1884).[31] Here he uses the Syrian arch that became a hallmark of Richardson designs for both theporte-cochère and the windows of the main structure. Reminiscent of a courtyard and temple that Morse illustrated fromNikkō in Tochigi prefecture, Japan, the hip roof on wide, bracketed eaves nearly hides the rough stonework below in shadow. Richardson even included a carved dragon at each end of the beam spanning the arches of windows.[32] The walls "become horizontal planes hovering above one another with bands of windows in between."[33]
Richardson was an early although not the first U.S. architect to look to Japan, but his train stations "form the earliest sustained application of Japanese inspiration in American architecture, an undeniable precursor to Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie house designs".[33] As with his libraries, Richardson evolved and simplified as the series continued, and his famous Chestnut Hill station (Newton, Massachusetts, 1883–1884, demolished circa 1960) featured clean lines with less Japanese influence.[33]
After his death, more than 20 other stations were designed in Richardson's style for the Boston and Albany line by the firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, all draftsmen of Richardson at the time of his death.[28] Many Boston and Albany stations were landscaped by Richardson's frequent collaborator,Frederick Law Olmsted. Additionally, a railroad station in Orchard Park, New York (near Buffalo) was built in 1911 as a replica of Richardson's Auburndale station in Auburndale, Massachusetts. The original Auburndale station was torn down in the 1960s during construction of the Massachusetts Turnpike. The original Richardson stations on the Boston and AlbanyHighland branch have either been demolished or converted to new uses (such as restaurants). Two of the stations designed by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge (both in Newton, Massachusetts) are still used by Boston's MBTA (green line) public transit service: andNewton Highlands station andNewton Centre station.
Although built in traditional fashion of stone without steel frame, Richardson's well-integrated Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago was very influential in the development of modern approaches to building facades.
The noted Marshall Field Wholesale Store (Chicago, 1885–1887, demolished 1930) is Richardson's "culminating statement of urban commercial form", and its remarkable design influenced Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and many other architects.[34] According toJeffrey Karl Ochsner, who has compiled all of Richardson's architectural works, despite its demolition in 1930, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store "is probably the most famous of Richardson's buildings, one that Richardson himself saw as among his most significant."[35] Architectural criticHenry-Russell Hitchcock states that in the Field Store, Richardson "was, perhaps, never more creative architecturally."[36] Drawing from his own earlier work and both Romanesque and Renaissance precedents, Richardson designed this "massive but integrated" seven-story stone warehouse.[37] Minimizing ornamentation in an era that employed much of it, he stressed what he termed "the beauty of material and symmetry rather than mere superficial ornamentation" with "the effects depending on the relations of 'voids and solids'... on the proportion of the parts."[38] Not requiring the new steel frame technology because of its comparatively low height, Richardson used multi-storied windows topped by arches to tie the stories together, and the regular patterns of the windows to tie the entire building into "a simple and unified solid occupying an entire block."[39]
Richardson designed many important single-family residences, but his famousJohn J. Glessner House (Chicago, 1885–87) is his best and most influential urban house. TheMary Fisk Stoughton House (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1882–1883), the Henry Potter House (St. Louis, 1886–1887, demolished 1958), and theRobert Treat Paine Estate (aka Stonehurst) (Waltham, Massachusetts, 1886) play that role for suburban and country settings.[40] The Glessner House in particular influenced Frank Lloyd Wright as he began developing what would become hisPrairie School houses.[41] With his house for Reverend Percy Browne (Marion, Massachusetts, 1881–82) Richardson revived "the old colonial form (of thegambrel roof) to shape the facade of an artistically ambitious house. Perhaps he used the gambrel to signify the humility appropriate to the profession of his client, but in doing so he sanctioned its use for wealthier patrons and by other architects. Within three years the crumpled gambrel profile was showing up everywhere" and became one of the notable features ofShingle Style architecture.[42]
Richardson is one of few architects to be immortalized by having a style named after him. "Richardsonian Romanesque", unlike Victorian revival styles likeNeo-Gothic, was a highly personal synthesis of the Beaux-Arts predilection for clear and legible plans, with the heavymassing that was favored by the pro-medievalists. It featured picturesque roofline profiles, rustication and polychromy, semi-circular arches supported on clusters of squat columns, and round arches over clusters of windows on massive walls.
Following his death, the Richardsonian style was perpetuated by a variety of proteges and other architects, many for civic buildings like city halls, county buildings, court houses, train stations and libraries, as well as churches and residences. These include:
the successor firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, who completed some two dozen unfinished projects and then continued to produce work in the same style, and continued to employ his collaborators the Norcross Brothers for construction and engineering expertise, Frederick Law Olmsted for landscape architecture, and the English sculptorJohn Evans for stonecarving
Richardson's great admirer Louis Sullivan adapted Richardson's characteristic lessons of texture, massing, and the expressive language of stone walling (see Richardson's noted Chicago building Marshall Field's Wholesale Store), particularly at Chicago'sAuditorium Building, and these influences are detectable in the work of Sullivan's own student Frank Lloyd Wright.
Richardson found sympathetic reception among young Scandinavian architects of the following generation, notablyEliel Saarinen.
Howard aka Taylor Library building, New Orleans, constructed 1886-1889
The Patrick F. Taylor Library, formerly known as the Howard Memorial Library, was built soon after Richardson's death. It is sometimes called "the only Richardson building located in the South".[43] Residents of New Orleans had wanted an example of Richardson's work, a native son of New Orleans. The office of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge used a Richardson design which had been submitted and rejected some years earlier for a library in Saginaw, Michigan. This leads some, particularly those in New Orleans, to argue that the building can be said to be by Richardson; the counter argument is that the design was not originally intended for this location and the building was constructed after Richardson's death with no input from the architect beyond the initial design. The library building is currently part of theOgden Museum of Southern Art.
The Amelia S. Givin Library in Mount Holly Springs, PA was designed by James T. Steen, a well known Pittsburgh architect who worked extensively in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The Givin Library was built in 1889 in the Richardsonian style. Its interior was finished in an Orientalism theme which used the 1885 patented Moorish Fretwork screens of Moses Younglove Ransom. The Givin Library is still in use as a public library.
Although many structures exist in the Romanesque style and some borrow so heavily that they are often mistaken for Richardson designs, several buildings have been built specifically to mimic a single Richardson structure.
Wellesley Farms Railroad Station – This structure was built by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (draftsmen of Richardson) soon after Richardson's death. Although this firm built many stations in Richardson's style, they were specifically penalized[by whom?] for this one because it was so similar to Richardson's Eliot station inNewton, Massachusetts.[44] Eliot station was torn down in the 1950s.[citation needed]
Castle Hill Light is a lighthouse inNewport, Rhode Island, which is often attributed to Richardson. Richardson drew a sketch for the lighthouse at that location which may have been the basis for the design, though the actual structure does not include the residence featured in Richardson's sketch.[citation needed]
^Mary Louise Christovich, et al. [ed.],New Orleans Architecture, v. 2: The American Sector (Gretna, LA), p. 174.
^Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold (1959) [1888].Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. p. 1.
^Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold (1959) [1888].Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. p. 15.
^Whiffen, Marcus (1992).American Architecture Since 1780: A Guide to the Styles (Revised ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 133.ISBN978-0-262-73097-6.
^"Buffalo State Hospital".National Historic Landmarks Program. Washington, DC: National Park Service. Archived fromthe original on May 2, 2008. RetrievedJanuary 11, 2009.
^Whiffen, Marcus (1992).American Architecture Since 1780: A Guide to the Styles (Revised ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 135.ISBN978-0-262-73097-6.
^abOchsner, Jeffrey Karl, "Architecture for the Boston & Albany Railroad,"Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47 (June 1988), pages 109-131.
^"Museum Architecture and Design".About the O. New Orleans: Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans. Archived fromthe original on November 4, 2011. RetrievedNovember 7, 2011.
^Roy, John H. Jr. (2007).A Field Guide to Southern New England Railroad Depots and Freight Houses. New England Rail Heritage Series. Pepperell, Massachusetts: Branch Line Press. pp. missing page citation.ISBN978-0-942147-08-7.
Breisch, Kenneth A,.Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America: A Study in Typology,MIT Press, 1997
Floyd, Margaret Henderson,Henry Hobson Richardson: A Genius for Architecture, Monacelli Press, NY 1997
Hitchcock, Henry Russell,The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times,Museum of Modern Art, NY 1936; 2nd ed., Archon Books, Hamden CT 1961; rev. paperback ed., MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London 1966
Larson, Paul C., ed., with Susan Brown,The Spirit of H.H. Richardson on the Midland Prairies: Regional Transformations of an Architectural Style, University Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Iowa State University Press, Ames 1988
Meister, Maureen, ed.,H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1999
Ochsner, Jeffrey Karl,H.H. Richardson: Complete Architectural Works, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1984
Ochsner, Jeffrey Karl, and Andersen, Dennis A.,Distant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson,University of Washington Press, Seattle 2003
O'Gorman, James F.,Living Architecture: A Biography of H. H. Richardson, Simon & Schuster, NY 1997
O'Gorman, James F.,H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society,University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1987
O'Gorman, James F.,H. H. Richardson and His Office: Selected Drawings, David R. Godine, Boston 1974
Roth, Leland M.,A Concise History of American Architecture, Harper & Row publishers, NY, NY 1979
Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold,Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, Dover Publications, Inc. NY 1959 (Reprint of 1888 edition)
Van Trump, James D., "The Romanesque Revival in Pittsburgh,"Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 16, No. 3 (October 1957), pp. 22–29
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