Henry Hobson Richardson

American architect

• Born: September 29, 1838
• Birthplace: Priestley plantation, St. James Parish, Louisiana
• Died: April 27, 1886
• Place of death: Brookline, Massachusetts

By absorbing early medieval stylistic ideas, suffusing them with his own vision, and adapting them to the needs of his own time, Richardson earned his reputation as one of the greatest American architects.

Early Life

Henry Hobson Richardson had a distinguished ancestor in Joseph Priestley, one of the founders of modern chemistry, whose granddaughter Caroline married Henry Dickenson Richardson, a partner in a Louisianacotton business, and gave birth to the future architect in 1838. The boy attended school in New Orleans and was destined for West Point, but the academy rejected him for stuttering. Having shown early promise in drawing and in mathematics, young Richardson entered Harvard College, with the goal of becoming a civil engineer. His academic work was unspectacular; his friendships, however, were constructive ones. He numbered among his friends Henry Adams, the future historian, and several young men who later helped him obtain commissions.

Richardson’s Class of 1859 photograph shows wide-set eyes in a rather long, thin face with dark, wavy hair. Although he looked serious, his classmates found him buoyant and personable. Another photograph taken in Paris, where he decided to study architecture at the École des Beaux Arts upon his graduation, confirms contemporary accounts of him as tall, slim, and clean-shaven.

Returning to the United States at around the end of the Civil War, Richardson chose New York over his native Louisiana as the best location for a beginning architect. His first commission, in 1866, for a new Unitarian Church in Springfield, Massachusetts, most likely arose from his college friendship with the son of an influential supporter of the project. In January of 1867, his career well launched, he married Julia Gorham Hayden, to whom he had been engaged since before his Parisian sojourn. The couple would have six children. Several factors—among them, early commissions in New England and the fact that his wife was a native of Cambridge, Massachusetts—suggested a move to the Boston area, and by 1874 the Richardsons had settled in Brookline, where he would continue to live and work.

Life’s Work

The Romanesque qualities for which Richardson would become famous began to appear in the third church he designed, the Brattle Square Church in Boston’s Back Bay, for which he won a competition in 1870. Taking advantage of local materials, he chose Roxbury pudding stone for this building, whose most original feature is its 176-foot corner tower, which has arches forming a carriageway at the bottom and smaller belfry arches above a frieze of sacramental figures, with a pyramidal roof. The tower is somewhat detached from the church, in the manner of the Italian campanile.

One indication of Richardson’s spreading fame was a commission for the Buffalo State Hospital buildings, also in 1870. Another was his selection, two years later, as designer of Trinity Church in Boston’s Copley Square, while the Brattle Square Church was still under construction nearby. Because this part of Boston is built on fill and is watery below the surface, the weight of the planned church required four thousand wooden piles beneath its foundation, and construction took more than three years.

This elaborate project included a sanctuary and a parish house that Richardson connected to the church by an open cloister. Built of granite with brownstone trim from local quarries and topped with a red tile upper roof, the church forms a Greek cross with a central tower based on one in Salamanca, Spain, as adapted by Stanford White, then Richardson’s assistant and later a noted architect. John La Farge, one of the premier artists of his time, designed the windows and interior decoration. It is an elaborate and colorful church, both inside and out, with elements of Gothic and high, round Romanesque arches, all of which exemplify Richardson’s genius for combining and modifying different styles to produce a unique, self-expressive result. Although additions, many of them unfortunate, have altered the church since Richardson’s time, it remains one of his most famous and admired structures.

Richardson enjoyed the opportunity to work at a time when small towns and cities in New England were seeking larger and more gracious public library buildings. Beginning in 1877, Richardson designed libraries for Woburn, North Easton, Quincy, and Malden, Massachusetts, as well as one for the University of Vermont. Although his fondness for massive structures ran counter to the American Library Association’s standards for flexibility in library design, all of his library buildings remained in use more than a century later. The Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, of Quincy granite, again with brownstone trim, is the simplest and is generally considered his finest. It is a rectangular structure of three main parts: stack wing with tiered alcoves, central hall, and reading room. Its asymmetrical front entrance is a low, broad Syrian arch surmounted by a gable. To the left of the arch is a circular stair tower with a low, conical roof. Asymmetrical end gables mark both ends of the building, for which Richardson also designed the original furniture.

Richardson also designed two additions to his alma mater: Sever Hall (1878) and Austin Hall (1881). The former uses red brick to harmonize with the older architecture of Harvard Yard, while the latter, for Harvard Law School, is sandstone with an elaborately carved entry arch and interior fireplace. More than a century after its construction, Austin Hall continued to be used mainly for its original purpose. Most architectural historians date Richardson’s maturity from the period in which these two educational buildings were designed, as well as the Crane Memorial Library (1880).

Richardson worked as a collaborator on the sprawling Albany, New York, capital over a period of many years beginning in 1875, but his most personal monument in Albany is its city hall, with a beautiful 202-foot corner tower, another design of 1880. In that year, construction began on a more unusual project, the Ames Monument in Wyoming, which commemorated two brothers’ contributions to the completion and administration of the Union Pacific Railroad. It is a granite pyramid, sixty feet square at its base and sixty feet high, erected near the railroad’s highest point above sea level. Medallions bearing busts of Oakes and Oliver Ames decorate the east and west faces, respectively. Twenty years after it was built, the railroad relocated to the south, and the nearby town of Sherman lost its economic base and disappeared. For most of the twentieth century, the monument has stood isolated and reachable only by secondary roads.

Other Richardsonian structures have fared worse. A number of his Massachusetts railroad stations have been demolished, others violently altered or allowed to fall into ruin; few continued as stations during the 1980’s. His most celebrated commercial building, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago, designed in 1885, was made of rock-faced red Missouri granite and red sandstone. Groups of windows were topped by arches at the fourth floor level of this seven-story building; narrower arches capped single rows of fifth- and sixth-story windows. The simplicity and harmonious proportions of this store can be admired today only in photographs, for, in 1930, the owner demolished it in favor of a parking lot.

Among his many other structures, Richardson designed a stone and a metal bridge in Boston’s Fenway during the early 1880’s, the Allegheny County courthouse and jail in Pittsburgh (1883-1884), and a considerable number of private residences, both of wood and stone, large and small, from the East Coast to St. Louis. Two of the latter, the William Watts Sherman House in Newport, Rhode Island (1874), and the J. J. Glessner House in Chicago (1885), have, along with Trinity Church, Sever Hall, the Allegheny County buildings, and the New York State capitol, been designated National Historic Landmarks.

Like all prominent architects, Richardson had to face the problems of popularity. As his work expanded, so did his workforce, and he found it necessary to delegate more authority and exercise less personal supervision over his projects. During the 1880’s, he took on too much work, but he chose his assistants and construction firms carefully and would not tolerate shoddy work. Charles McKim and Stanford White of his office went on to renown in a firm of their own.

Richardson was a convivial man who enjoyed good company, good food, and good wine. Photographs of him in his maturity show the formerly slender architect to be a massive man with a full mustache and a bushy beard. One anecdote has three of his assistants standing together able to wrap themselves in one of his coats. Although his creative energy continued to flow, Bright’s disease took its toll in his final years, increasingly limiting the mobility of a man whose work was frequently in progress in several scattered locations. In 1886, only a year after an American Architect and Building News poll rated five of his buildings among the ten finest in the United States, with Trinity Church first, and while his fame was finally reaching Europe, where American building had never been taken seriously, Henry Hobson Richardson died at the age of forty-seven.

Significance

When Richardson began his work during the 1860’s, civic buildings in the United States were likely to follow classical or Renaissance styles, churches often followed the Victorian Gothic, while commercial structures were most often mere utilitarian boxes. Thus, Richardson’s boast that he would design anything from a chicken coop to a cathedral reflects no mere indiscriminate appetite for building but a rejection of outworn conventions and an affirmation that a developed architectural sensibility might apply itself to any sort of building. The more one studies the range of Richardson’s work—public, commercial, religious, and private buildings—the more clearly they can be seen as the expression of his artistic vision. A suburban or village railroad station was to be taken as seriously as a church and was as worthy of beauty.

At the same time, Richardson did not neglect the requirements of the task at hand. He preserved his independence and would not yield to clients’ notions that were inconsistent with his own ideas, but neither was he indifferent to their requirements. His buildings became more functional and less ornate as his career proceeded. His placement of windows, for example, was dictated not by formal requirements of the exterior facade only but by interior needs. Richardson was the first American architect to combine creativity of the highest order with receptiveness to the needs of contemporaries. In a period of divorce between aesthetic and utilitarian concerns, Richardson united them in his mature work.

Richardson’s influence, powerful for several decades after his death, was not always beneficial. Certain features of his design—the arches, towers, and rough stone exteriors—were easy to imitate, but the Richardsonian integrity that fused these and other less obvious elements into an artistic whole was not. In the years following his death, some of the most notable architectural talents occupied themselves with the requirements of the skyscraper, which implied not great masses of masonry but skeletons of steel and lower floor windows on a scale incompatible with typical Richardsonian materials and designs.

Although it is difficult to determine what contribution Richardson might have made had he lived longer, the work he left did not point toward the twentieth century. In large American cities, even Boston, which resisted it into the 1960’s, the skyscraper became an economic inevitability. The glassy John Hancock Building now dwarfs nearby Trinity Church. Richardson’s greatest commercial building, the Field Store, was wiped out as an anachronism as early as 1930 in downtown Chicago. Vast bland airports have supplanted Richardson’s railroad stations as symbols of America on the move.

In recent decades, however, the value of Richardson buildings has been recognized more widely. The National Historic Landmark Program, which began in 1960, and the National Register of Historic Places Program, dating from 1966, offer substantial protection, the National Register including thirty-two of Richardson’s works. The harmony and solid beauty of his best churches, libraries, and private homes continue to answer human needs left unsatisfied by the buildings that have come to dominate urban skylines.

Bibliography

Breisch, Kenneth A. Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America: A Study in Typology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Examines Richardson’s designs for five public libraries, describing his architectural style and the historical background of these buildings.

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1961. The most thorough of the twentieth century studies of Richardson’s work, this book contains some biographical facts and a learned, if often dogmatic, evaluation of his subject’s significance.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Richardson as a Victorian Architect. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Pamphlets, 1966. A lecture based on a seminar given at Harvard University in 1965. Hitchcock adroitly relates Richardson’s work to the diverse strands that make up the complicated conception that is “Victorian architecture.”

Mumford, Lewis. The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1955. Mumford argues that Richardson, in using metal skeletons in two of his late commercial buildings, laid the basis for bridging the gap between stone construction and the ensuing steel-and-glass age. An eloquent appreciation of Richardson’s contribution to his profession.

Ochsner, Jeffrey Karl. H. H. Richardson: Complete Architectural Works. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982. This handsome book includes not only photographs and plans of proposed and completed Richardson projects but also views of the author and his studios that provide valuable insights into his working habits. Biographical information is restricted chiefly to the details of his business life. Extensive bibliographies and appendixes showing the locations of his buildings and indicating their preservation status mark this meticulously researched volume.

O’Gorman, James F. H. H. Richardson and His Office: Selected Drawings. Cambridge, Mass.: Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Harvard College Library, 1974. O’Gorman’s thirty-page introductory essay is particularly useful for its attention to the architect’s working methods.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Living Architecture: A Biography of H. H. Richardson. Photographs by Cervin Robinson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. O’Gorman, the most productive Richardsonian scholar since Hitchcock, evaluates the architect’s life and work. The book is particularly valuable for its more than 150 photographs of Richardson’s buildings.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Makers of Trinity Church in the City of Boston. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. A collection of ten essays, each one describing the contributions of a person or persons responsible for the construction, decoration, and use of the church. Includes essays about Richardson’s roles as architect and creator of the church furnishings.

Roger, Laura Wood. F. L. O.: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Scattered references to Richardson and also a detailed account of the happy collaboration of Richardson with the greatest landscape architect of his time.

Russell, John. “Henry Hobson Richardson.” American Heritage 32 (October/November, 1981): 48-59. A lively and beautifully illustrated essay by an art critic who sees Richardson as the transformer—even the creator—of the architectural profession in the United States.

Van Rensselaer, Marianna Griswold. Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1969. All students of Richardson are heavily indebted to Van Rensselaer, who wrote the only true biography of a man whom she knew personally and whose work she understood thoroughly. Commissioned as a tribute to Richardson shortly after his death, the book remains a readable and valuable account of his works. Virtually all of the limited personal information to be had about its subject is to be found here.