An Internationally Acclaimed Architect: H. H. Richardson

Sources

First Among His Peers. In 1885 the American Architect and Building News asked seventy-five American architects to identify the ten buildings they most admired in the United States. The poll yielded one clear favorite: Trinity Church, in Boston’s Copley Square. Designed by the Louisiana-born and Paris-trained H. H. Richardson (1838-1886), Trinity received 84 percent of the first-place votes. Of the top ten vote getters, four other structures were Richardson creations: the city hall and the state capitol in Albany, New York, the Sever Hall classroom building at Harvard University, and the town hall in North Easton, Massachusetts. Richardson, just forty-seven years old at the time, stood without peer among American architects.

Parisian Training. Born in New Orleans, Henry Hobson Richardson grew up in a well-to-do plantation household. After graduating from Harvard University in 1859, Richardson went to Paris to commence his professional training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, headquarters of the Western architectural establishment. Richardson

was only the second American student accepted to the Ecole; Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) had preceded him, in 1848. Richardson’s funding from home lapsed in 1861, because of the Civil War. Although he had not yet completed his program of study, Richardson left school to work as an assistant at a Paris architectural firm. He remained there until the end of the Civil War in 1865, when he returned to the United States to begin his American career.

Concrete Shape and Color. Although his birth and education had fitted him for an aristocratic life—and although the industriai barons of the American Gilded Age richly rewarded those architects willing to subvert good taste to conspicuous display—Richardson scorned upper-class frippery. “It would not cost me a bit of trouble to build French buildings that should reach from here to Philadelphia,” he observed on his return to America, “but that is not what I want to do.” Richardson’s earliest work borrowed from popular Gothic and Renaissance forms; by the 1870s, however, his work grew more innovative. In 1872 Richardson won the design competition for Trinity Church. He relocated his office from New York to Boston and began work on the building that established him as an American original. Completed in 1877, Trinity featured a cavernous interior space decorateci by artist John La Farge (1835-1910). The church—set on a triangular lot on the edge of the new Back Bay of Boston—was large in mass and simple in proportion. Its rough granite facing, contrasting stone trim, and rounded arches resurfaced in future Richardson designs. Richardson liked to explain that the architect’s work “is plastic work, and, like the sculptor’s, cannot be fully judged except in concrete shape and color, amid actual lights and shadows and its own particular surroundings.” The buildings that Richardson designed over the following decade—the town hall at North Easton (1879), perched on granite ledges; the Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885), its multistory arcades reflecting the vitality of downtown Chicago—bespoke Richardson’s sensitivity to the magic of “particular surroundings.”

THE BEAUX-ARTS

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which taught the principle of classical architecture, served as the high temple of architectural studies in the nineteenth century. By the close of the century American architecture had become big business, and a Paris education had become a prerequisite for professional success. By the late 1880s young architects had begun to reject H.H. Richardson’s Romanesque revivalism — with its bold displays and medieval echoes — and to edge toward the new “Academic” style that had come into vogue at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As the architect Joseph Wells (1853-1890) explained, “The classical ideal suggests clearness, simplicity, grandeur, order and philosophical cal — consequently it delights my soul. The medieval ideal suggests superstition, ignorance, vulgarity, restlessness, cruelty and religioall of which fill my soul with horror and loathing.” The typical Beaux-Arts building was monumental in scale, symmetrical in composition, and marked externally by statues, columns, and grand staircase. At its best the Beaus-Arts style lent dignity to turbulent, sprawling American cities. At its worst it institutionalized the excesses of the Guided Age.

The East Coast emerged as the capital of Beaux-Arts classicism — and the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead and Write, founded in 1879, became the leading exponent of the style. With his partners William R. Mead (1846-1928) and Stanford White (1853-1906), Charles F. McKim (1847-1909), who had been Richardson’s assistant during the early 1870s, challenged the Richardson aesthetic. In Boston, directly across from Richardson’s Trinity Church in Copley Square, McKim, Mead and White built the Boston Public Library (1888-1895), faced in gray stone and modeled on the palatial buildings of the Italian Renaissance, the library could not have presented a sharper contrast to the hulking, asymmetrical, multi chromatic church across the way. In 1893 McKim, Mead and White helped transform the shores of Lake Michigan into a vision in white: their designs, along with those of Daniel Burnham and Richard Morris Hunt, established Beaux-Arts as the “official” style of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Closer to home McKim, Mead and White designed the magisterial Penn-Station (1906-1910) in downtown Manhattan, where it joined other monuments to Beaux-Arts splendor: the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Hunt, 1880-1895), the New York Public Library (Carrere and Hastings, 1895-1902), and the Grand Central Terminal (Warren and Wetmore, 1903-1913). Critics have argued that Beaux-Arts structures — beautiful, grand, and somewhat off-putting — celebrate wealth not taste. Yet in their very majesty, these works also reflected t6he optimism of a new, Progressive Era.

Sources: David P. Hundlin, American Architecture London: Thames & Hudson, 1985);

Lewis Mumford, Sticks Stones: A Study of (American Architecture and Civilization New York Boni & Liveright, 1924);

The Richardsonian Legacy. Richardson influenced American architecture to such an extent that his name was adopted as an adjective. “Richardsonian” architecture was an interpretation of the Romanesque—a style first developed in western Europe around the year A.D. 1000 and marked by rounded arches, decorative arcades, and profuse ornamentation. Richardson’s work differed from earlier Romanesque design in its deemphasis of ornament and its use of polychromatic wall design. (When the critic Lewis Mumford dubbed the 1880s and 1890s “the brown decades,” he had in mind the russets, beiges, and auburns of Romanesque brickwork.) A romantic as well as a pragmatist, Richardson once identified “a grain elevator and the interior of a great river steamboat” as the most compelling of design projects. During his brief lifetime Richardson, who died in 1886 at age forty-seven, completed more than sixty major works and inspired legions of disciples. During the late 1880s and into the 1890s architectural firms in Boston, Detroit, and Chicago perpetuated the Richardsonian style—frequently, alas, rendering it earthbound in the process. Meanwhile, a cadre of New York-based architects spearheaded a classicist revival that repudiated the Richardsonian legacy, but in the century since his death Richardson has been recognized as an American original.

Sources

John Burchard and Albert Bush-Brown, The Architecture of America: A Social and Cultural History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961);

Leonard K. Eaton, American Architecture Comes of Age: European Reaction to H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972);

William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972);

James O’Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).