H. H. Richardson - Table of Contents
Henry Hobson Richardson -- Biography and Work
Henry
Hobson Richardson
(1838-86)Born at Priestly Plantation in Louisiana in 1838, Richardson learned early to speak French. He attended public and private schools in New Orleans before going to Harvard in 1854. At Harvard, he excelled in math, continued his study of drawing (an avocation he had started at age 10), and gave up civil engineering in favor of architecture. All would serve him will when he applied to be the second American student to enter the L'Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
He remained in France throughout the Civil War (he had frinds in the North and relatives in the South). After his return to the US in 1865, he settled in a house on Staten Island. His neighbor was the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, with whom he later collaborated, for example in Buffalo for the Buffalo State Hospital.
His assistants Charles F. McKim and Stanford White developed their Shingle style from Richardson's fresh use of old materials in his domestic architecture. He also influenced such notable architects as Louis Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Biographers have seen three Richardsons: the Romanesque revivalist, the Victorian designer, and the proto-modernist.Richardson's knowledge of the Queen Anne Olde English style of Richard Norman Shaw, transmitted through the pages of The Builder and other British journals to which Richardson subscribed, is clearly evident in Richardson's domestic architecture of the 1870s (Andrews House, Newport, 1872; James Cheney House Project, South Manchester, Connecticut, 1878; and especially the Watts Sherman House, built in Newport in 1874). The "free style" of Shaw encouraged a picturesqueness, textural richness and materially tectonic architecture that was rich, never academically dry, and conducive to a first decisive step out of the historicism of the midcentury.
Trinity ChurchIt was not this "Victorian" Richardson whose mark was to be stamped most significantly on the American landscape. In his masterful transitional project for Trinity Church, Boston, Richardson first brought together the forces that would mark the very best of his work: Romanesque masses compacted in a solid composition of weighty volumes and powerful forms; textural variety of colorful materials directly laid up and juxtaposed in an ornamental tapestry of surface enrichment; craftsmanship evidenced in a building which is both the simple construction of a master mason as well as the handiwork of a team of artisans.
In the academic tradition of the American Renaissance (embodied in McKim, Mead and White's Boston Public Library, added the following decade across Copley Square from Trinity), Richardson's building is a total work of art: Augustus St. Gaudens' sculpture adorns the open space outside the north transept and adjacent to Trinity's flanking chapel building; John LaFarge stained glass and mural; William Morris stained glass (three upper north transept windows and baptistery window); and Romanesque capitals and other carvings enrich an added west porch, based on St. Giles du Gard. However, it would be in its restrained pyramidal massing and in its translation of both the Romanesque vocabulary and pictorial surface effects to an almost abstract simplicity that Trinity's impact on subsequent work by the architect would be felt.When Richardson died prematurely in 1886, William LeBaron Jenney had just complete Chicago's first skyscraper and Frank Lloyd Wright was about to build his first house. Although he would not live to witness the rapid changes in both urban and suburban architectural design, in 20 short years Richardson had already made his mark. From his monumental masonry blocks of "Richardsonian Romanesque" to the landscape settings of North Easton, Richardson had established a lasting legacy for American architects of the following generation.
The Three Buffalo Buildings:
Other Surviving Richardson Buildings:
- Crane Memorial Library, Quincy, 1890
- Stoughton House in Cambridge (1882)
- Albany City Hall (1880-82)
- Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail in Pittsburgh (1883-8)
- Cheney Block in Hartford, Connecticut (1875-76)
- Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885-87) in Chicago
- Ames Library at North Easton, Massachusetts, 1877
- Ames Memorial Town Hall (1879)
- Chestnut Hill Railroad Station (1883)
- Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Allegheny City (Pittsburgh) (1883)
- Episcopal Church in Albany (1883)
