Rare are the architects whose works permanently alter our perceptions of how structures should look and function. Rarer still are the master builders who both change the way we see things and also attract a school of followers who carry their ideas well into the future. Such transformative figures are easy enough to identify in twentieth-century architecture—Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe immediately come to mind. Although it is harder to find their equivalents among the scrum of nineteenth-century architects before historical eclecticism gave way to the full emergence of modernism, one conspicuous exception is H.H. Richardson, whom Lewis Mumford with good reason called “the first architect of distinction in America who was ready to face the totality of modern life.”
During Richardson’s all too brief but highly fruitful two-decade career, he designed many houses and churches, the bread and butter of architects in his day. But he also had a clearer idea than any of his coprofessional contemporaries of where the country was headed after the Civil War, and he readily embraced evolving building categories that embodied the changing times. His virtuoso variations on a theme for railway stations (nine Boston and Albany Railroad depots) and public libraries (in four Massachusetts communities) established practical, adaptable templates that were followed nationwide. With breathtaking range he reconceived the paradigm for mental health care, from the prisonlike Hogarthian madhouse to the therapeutic medical facility (New York’s State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo of 1869–1880, which in 2017 was sensitively converted into a hotel by Deborah Berke), and he dignified mass consumerism with a palazzo-like urban warehouse (Chicago’s Marshall Field’s Wholesale Store of 1885–1887, destroyed in 1930). The unified stylistic mode he devised to accommodate them all—a simplified, strengthened version of medieval Romanesque architecture that reinterpreted its stolid proportions, textured brick and stonework, arched doorways and windows, and propensity for turrets and towers—became known as “Richardsonian” and remained a veritable lingua franca of American civic architecture for decades after his death.
By the mid-nineteenth century, save for some fine adaptations of Classicism during the first decades after independence and the vigorous carpenters’ vernacular that grew out of it, a truly original architectural expression had yet to materialize in the US. In Europe, recourse to historical styles accelerated even as new materials and construction methods proliferated. But everywhere architecture seemed aesthetically irresolute even as it advanced technically. Unprecedented uses for steel and concrete were cloaked in distracting surface elements—granite Roman columns, terra-cotta Gothic arches, marble Baroque cartouches—notwithstanding the midcentury French architect Henri Labrouste, who showed how the frank exposure of modern structural elements could be perfectly compatible with Classical motifs and even revivify them.
A search for the origins of American modernism leads us straight to Richardson. Although he has long been accepted as the pivotal figure in bridging the gap between traditionalism and modernism in this country, exactly how he accomplished that is made clearer than ever in an instructive, handsomely produced volume, Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University, by Jay Wickersham, Chris Milford, and Hope Mayo. It opens with an authoritative overview by the long-standing dean of Richardson scholars, James F. O’Gorman, the nonagenarian Wellesley professor emeritus whose research on the architect is unparalleled and will likely remain so. Aided by a wide range of beautifully reproduced renderings, from Richardson’s lightning-bolt conceptual sketches to seductive presentation drawings by his talented assistants (who included the young Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White, two thirds of what became the most famous triumvirate in American architecture), we are led, project by project and step by step, through the prolific master’s output.
We follow Richardson’s growth from early jobs, in which he dealt somewhat tentatively with routine assignments, to late-period flights of extraordinary sophistication prompted by the more challenging commissions he received as his reputation grew. Several projects are analyzed in considerable depth, and the exemplary layout of the oversize format, by the graphic designer Jena Sher, encourages a focus on telling details that illuminate Richardson’s design procedures.
For instance, the sixteen-page section on Boston’s Trinity Church and Parish House of 1872–1877 begins with his seldom-seen initial proposal, which featured an ill-proportioned masonry tower above the crossing. That ungainly feature was scrapped when structural engineers determined that the unstable soil below it—part of the Back Bay landfill zone—could not support so much weight. Richardson’s much-improved final design is first glimpsed as a quickly jotted outline on a crowded worksheet amid thumbnail floor plans for a Newport “cottage” and random cost-estimate arithmetic. The sanctuary is now surmounted by a harmonious pyramidal roof atop a low, broad, square tower instead of a spindly campanile; the compact but generous volume beneath manages to be at once majestic and welcoming. Never has geology been a more helpful design partner, and to this day Trinity Church maintains its calm but powerful presence even as strident skyscrapers crowd around it on Copley Square.
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Henry Hobson Richardson was born in 1838 at Priestley Plantation, his maternal family’s sugarcane farm on the Mississippi River sixty miles west of New Orleans. His father’s family were well-to-do Louisiana cotton merchants; his mother was a granddaughter of the British scientist Joseph Priestley, who identified oxygen and invented carbonated water but whose dissenting religious and political beliefs forced him to flee to the United States. Richardson’s father wanted the boy to pursue a military career, but West Point rejected him because of a stammer he never overcame (and shared with Priestley).
After a false start at Tulane he transferred to Harvard, where he turned out to be a lackadaisical student but an avid reader and a magnetic social force, described by one contemporary as “full of creole life and animation.” Among the enduring friends he attracted in Cambridge was the future author of The Education of Henry Adams, the third-person autobiography whose narrator averred that “certainly Adams made no acquaintance there that he valued in after life so much as Richardson.”
Soon after he graduated in 1859, Richardson, who had changed his career path from civil engineering to architecture, sailed for Europe, and the following year he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he was torn between loyalty to the South and the warnings of his Harvard friends, including Adams (who was secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s minister to the Court of St. James’s), that his career prospects in the North would be wrecked if he fought for the Confederacy. “Politics I wash my hands of, externally at least,” Richardson wrote.
The Union naval blockade of New Orleans and the city’s subsequent surrender cut off disbursements from his family, and to support himself he found part-time work in Parisian architectural ateliers while he continued his studies. But it was a fine time for an aspiring architect to be marooned in France, during spirited debates over the future of the profession, with opposing factions led by major theorist-practitioners—the avant-moderniste Labrouste on one side and the Gothic revivalist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc on the other.
When peace came, Richardson returned to America and settled in New York, alert to where the postwar main chance lay. In 1866 another old Harvard friend arranged his first independent commission, for a Unitarian church in Springfield, Massachusetts—one of many jobs he would get through personal connections. (It also helped that Priestley was a foundational proponent of Unitarianism.) The next year he married a Boston doctor’s daughter, Julia Hayden, with whom he had six children. In 1874 they moved to the Boston suburb of Brookline, where their Federal-period house, with its two-story white-columned portico reminiscent of an antebellum Southern mansion, served as home and office for the rest of his life, with additions he appended to it as his staff increased.
A huge step forward in Richardson’s fortunes came in 1872 when he won the prestigious competition for Trinity Church. It was a covetable commission not only because of the prominent site this grand sanctuary was to occupy on the main public square of the city’s newly developed Back Bay district, but also because it symbolized the final ascendance of the Episcopal Church—socially if not theologically—over the other Protestant denominations that had vied for supremacy since the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Trinity’s charismatic rector, Phillips Brooks, was among the most renowned preachers in a period when religious oratory was considered a sacred art form and people flocked to hear spellbinding declamations on faith, redemption, and salvation. The internal layout of the new church was carefully calibrated to give Brooks’s sermons optimal acoustics before the advent of electronic sound amplification. Instead of adopting the long Latin-cross ground plan of traditional Christian worship, Richardson designed Trinity as a centralized Greek cross in which all four arms are equal. Although its high altar was positioned at the rear wall of the chancel in the orthodox manner (the fad for placing communion tables at the center of a church was still a century away), the large open area created by the equidistant nave and transepts enabled as many congregants as possible to hear and see the preacher in his elevated pulpit at one corner of the crossing.
With its bold wooden trusses and intricately patterned, richly polychromed surfaces, the soaring interior, which projects upward into the tower above the crossing, emits an almost Viking vitality hardly to be expected of the genteel Brahmins who sponsored it. A testimony to Richardson’s powers of persuasion—“He could charm a bird out of a bush,” a contemporary noted—Trinity Church has consistently been ranked among the greatest works of American architecture in polls of building professionals, and justly so.
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Opportunities galore came Richardson’s way thereafter, among them two buildings on the Harvard campus in Cambridge: Sever Hall of 1878–1880 and Austin Hall of 1881–1884, which together provide a study in contrasts and tell us much about how he would adjust his designs depending on the money at his disposal. That he should have eventually been engaged to design something for his alma mater seems inevitable, but the genesis of the back-to-back Harvard commissions was even cozier than might have been expected: the university’s treasurer was also Richardson’s landlord in Brookline.
Part of an expansion plan meant to continue the redbrick quadrangle arrangement that had defined Harvard since its founding, the four-story Sever Hall (named for the recently deceased alumnus whose bequest paid for it) combines a symmetrical rectangular façade with more and larger fenestration than usual for a Richardson scheme, necessary in this case because of its function as a classroom building. The main entry, which faces Harvard Yard, is defined by one of the architect’s signature motifs: a Romanesque arch that springs from low brackets (as elsewhere from squat columns) to impart a pronounced half-circle effect weightier and more grounded than the high arches of the Classical tradition. But on the whole this skillful essay in red brick looks back to the Colonial era in its unpretentious material and modest ornamentation.
Austin Hall, the first home of Harvard Law School, is an entirely different proposition, regardless of the two buildings’ similar dimensions and silhouettes. Austin is more overtly Romanesque, and its principal front is unabashedly spectacular, starting with its lyrical trio of columned entry arches supported by intricately carved capitals that would be at home on the Piazza San Marco. The building was underwritten by the rich Boston merchant for whose late brother it was named. But whereas Sever Hall had to be realized within the fixed amount stipulated by its donor’s will, with a living, paying client Richardson was able to plead for all the costly extras that make Austin Hall a far more luxurious exercise. The façade fairly glitters with its broad lateral band of red and beige sandstone squares in a checkerboard pattern, large floriform roundels, impish cherub heads, and Celtic knotwork—quite the opposite of the limestone cornice incised with a singularly dull verse from the book of Exodus.
For Richardson art and life were inseparable. As his first biographer, the pioneering architecture critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, wrote in 1888, the MIT students who assisted him were “constantly at his hearth and table and seemed as much a part of his family as the children he loved to have around him while at work.” His eldest, Julia, who lived until 1965, adored her busy father’s attentiveness. He’d ask her opinions about doors and windows while he sketched, and she recalled, “We reveled in it, he was so gay and full of fun.”
Richardson’s prodigious élan vital was not lost on his growing roster of clients. His reassuring self-confidence and contagious optimism helped overcome any hesitancy they might have had about his unprecedented, forward-thinking designs. To twenty-first-century eyes his architecture looks neotraditional, but when it was new, it stood in bold contrast to the prevalence of finicky, overly ornamented designs to which unrelated details were added like frosting on a cake. Not for nothing was the gimcrack detailing of Carpenter’s Gothic called gingerbread. In a departure from the prevailing norm, and pointing the way to Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richardson integrated ornament into his buildings in a way that emphasized their structural integrity, a major concern of emergent modernism.
The physical presentation of architects has always been essential in a discipline where aesthetics are a crucial factor, and Richardson, who was nearly six feet tall, had, in Mumford’s words, “the build and driving force of a bison.” However, although he had been slender as a young man, his overfondness for food and drink led to extreme weight gain that was exacerbated by nephritis, the kidney ailment that would kill him at age forty-seven. Toward the end of his life he weighed 345 pounds. He freely indulged his gargantuan appetites, as attested by his friend and collaborator Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the period’s foremost American sculptor, whose works embellished several Richardson commissions. Saint-Gaudens left this vivid account of dining at the architect’s Brookline house:
It would require a Rabelais to do justice to his unusual power and character. He had an enormous girth, and a halt in his speech, which made the words that followed come out like a series of explosions…. He would say before dinner: “S-S-Saint-Gaudens, ordinarily I lead a life of a-ab-stinence, but to-night I am going to break my rule to celebrate your visit, you come so rarely.” He would thereupon order a magnum of champagne, which, as none of the family drank it, had to be finished by him and me. Unfortunately, I am very moderate in such matters, and the result was the consumption of virtually the whole magnum by my good friend. This had to be accompanied by cheese, which was also proscribed by the doctor, and of this he ate enormous quantities. The proceeding doubtless occurred every night, as he always arranged to bring home a guest.
Richardson’s immoderate behavior took its toll, and when the Bavarian-born British painter Hubert von Herkomer first met him a few years before the architect’s death he exclaimed, “My God, he looks like his buildings!” (More than a hundred years later the British architectural historian Gavin Stamp seconded Herkomer when he wrote that Richardson was “as massive, as heavy, as wide, and as striking” as his structures. Tellingly, a man’s protruding paunch used to be called his bay window, a frequent component of Richardson’s designs.)
During the 1880s the fashionable Herkomer traveled to America in search of lucrative portrait commissions. Impressed by Richardson’s work, he offered to do a likeness of him in exchange for the design of a house and studio he wanted to build in the Hertfordshire town of Bushey. The architect agreed, and the finished painting (now in Washington’s National Portrait Gallery) depicts him as jovial and commanding, half Falstaff, half Henry VIII. Confronting the viewer head-on, he wears a bulging black waistcoat instead of his trademark yellow vest, probably because the artist did not want a vast expanse of bright color to dominate the composition.
In return Richarson drew up a scheme for a baronial stone-clad mansion-cum-atelier, which after his death was completed by the owner, who named it Lululaund after his late wife, Eliza Louisa Griffiths, known as Lulu. Richardson’s only work outside the US, this stunningly imaginative fantasy—a varicolored array of cylindrical towers, conical turrets, attenuated gables, and patterned masonry—was unified on its main façade by a monumental arch that seems as though it could span a river. It was demolished in 1939, but one remnant happily survives. The wide stone surround of the entry portal and its richly carved fan-shaped tympanum were rescued and reused in situ for the front door of the Royal British Legion clubhouse in Bushey, a delightful little building that was remodeled into apartments in 2014.
In his 1931 book The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895, an early reappraisal of the post–Civil War era, Mumford pinpointed Richardson’s significance:
Architecture, on the down grade since the twenties, had by 1860 touched bottom…. Within thirty years the situation had changed…. How did this change come about? In back of it stands a colossal man, Henry Hobson Richardson, an architect who almost single-handed created out of a confusion which was actually worse than a mere void the beginnings of a new architecture.
That encomium, issued a year before the Museum of Modern Art’s watershed “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” (now commonly called the International Style show), accorded with the modernist genealogy set forth by the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who organized that survey with Philip Johnson and Mumford. (Hitchcock went on to produce a full-length life-and-works on Richardson, published in 1936.) Richardson has more often been defined as a Romanesque Revivalist than a protomodernist, but his free reinterpretations of early medieval forms are notably different from the similarly referential Rundbogenstil (round arch style) architecture that enjoyed a vogue in German-speaking countries earlier in the nineteenth century.
During the decades before Bismarck’s unification of the Germanic states in 1871, a historical touchstone among nationalistic Prussian, Saxon, and Bavarian architects was the late Roman and early medieval architecture of Trier in the Rhineland. Although Richardson absorbed ideas from Romanesque prototypes (mainly French and Spanish examples he had seen on his travels), his buildings possess a volumetric heft and psychic gravitas that make many Rundbogenstil schemes, despite their brick or masonry exteriors, feel thinly picturesque—as stiff and flat as a billboard.
From 1880 to 1920 the Richardsonian style disseminated across the US as a rising generation of young, progressively minded architects eager for new approaches adapted it for everything from town halls and public schools in New England manufacturing centers to government offices and land-grant colleges on the Great Plains to the first buildings on the Stanford University campus in California, which were designed by his former assistants. Its reach extended to the new US territory of the Hawaiian Islands, where Honolulu’s Bishop Museum for natural and cultural history brought the formula to Polynesia. Fraternities, firehouses, orphanages, power plants, hospitals, mausoleums—every possible function could be well contained within the rough-hewn brown masonry, sturdy massing, and broad proportions that became as much a staple of American civic construction in the days of Grover Cleveland as the Greek Revival had been in the age of Jefferson.
Although Richardson’s influence diminished as Beaux-Arts Classicism ascended after the imperialist apotheosis of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, it persisted in virtually every American community until the mid-twentieth-century craze for demolishing historic landmarks swept the land. Richardson’s pervasive posthumous impact coincided with the final mapping of the continent, as ten western territories achieved statehood in the three decades after his death, and his rugged architectural vocabulary proved to be particularly suitable for public buildings in those regions.
Emblematic of that appropriateness is the remarkable monument Richardson dreamed up for a remote prairie site of exceptional natural grandeur: a hillside at the highest point of the Union Pacific Railroad, which linked the east and west coasts when it met the Central Pacific Railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. The Oakes and Oliver Ames Monument of 1879–1882, near the southeastern Wyoming town of Sherman and within view of distant mountains, commemorates two brothers from the clan that became the architect’s most important patrons. Between 1874 and 1885 the Ameses commissioned fifteen projects from Richardson, including five in their hometown of North Easton, Massachusetts—a library; a meeting hall; a train station; additions to their private estate, Langwater; and an unexecuted village church.
The family’s business, the Ames Shovel Works, prospered during the California gold rush, the westward expansion, and the Civil War. It was jointly run by Oakes Ames, dubbed the King of Spades, a five-term Republican congressman for Massachusetts during the six-year construction of the Union Pacific (in which the siblings invested heavily), and Oliver Ames Jr., who became the railway company’s president. To speed the lagging project along, Oakes bribed his fellow legislators with cash and discounted company stock to gain their votes for government funding of its construction.
Cost projections, however, were fraudulently doubled, and several co-conspirators pocketed the difference. In 1872 the exposure of the Crédit Mobilier scandal—named for the limited liability corporation that funded the Union Pacific and in which both Oakes and Oliver were involved—disclosed the Ameses’ part in the scam. The House of Representatives censured Oakes, who was vilified as Hoax Ames. Soon afterward he died in dishonor, and four years later Oliver followed him. (One of Oakes’s great-great-grandchildren was George Plimpton, a founder of The Paris Review.)
To restore their family’s good name, the surviving Ameses quickly initiated several architectural tributes to the brothers. They turned to Richardson, who rose to the troublesome occasion with a solution unlike anything else created at a time when memorials to the Civil War dead were still being erected. Those designs generally drew on Classical (and sometimes Gothic) precedents. Richardson harked back instead to prehistoric cairns for a work that recognized the disgraced Ameses’ proudest achievement.
Richardson was fascinated by massive geological specimens like the smooth glacial boulders he encountered in New England and incorporated into his mature designs when he had a large enough budget. He did so for the Ames estate’s magnificent arched gate lodge, now considered his most audacious effort, a tour de force of art derived directly from nature. He used roughly quarried stone to much the same effect elsewhere and made buildings in rural locales look like organic outgrowths of the landscape. O’Gorman convincingly hypothesizes that Richardson, who never traveled farther west than St. Louis, was inspired by A.J. Russell’s photographs of naturally stacked rock outcroppings taken along the Union Pacific route close to the designated site.
Sixty feet square at its base and sixty feet high, the Ames Monument inscribes a virtual cube. Its walls are canted inward to form a pyramid, but near the apex it stops short of a peak and angles more acutely to form a shallower pyramid at the very top. This subtle choice seems a masterstroke, so typical of Richardson’s intuitive feel for exactly the right gesture. Furthermore, it avoids mimicry of a pharaoh’s tomb. The material for this modern tumulus was taken from a nearby granite protuberance called Reed’s Rock—an act of environmental vandalism that would outrage conservationists today—and then partially shaped into more regular blocks to allow the mound’s assembly.
Except for an identifying inscription, the only imagery is a pair of nine-foot-high rectangular bas-reliefs of the brothers carved by Saint-Gaudens from Massachusetts granite, a touch of New England two thousand miles from their birthplace. Richardson’s timeless combination of elemental geometric forms and indigenous geological appropriations anticipates by nearly a century the minimalist Land Art of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and their cohort.
One region of the country where Richardson did not build was the South. Soon after his death, regretful New Orleanians realized that they had no example of their celebrated native son’s work. To remedy the deficiency, his Boston successor firm—Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge (its three principals all worked for Richardson, and George Foster Shepley married his daughter Julia)—dusted off their old boss’s rejected proposal for a library in Saginaw, Michigan.
The work that resulted, Howard Memorial Library of 1886–1889, has been called Richardson’s only building in the former Confederacy, although purists question that designation because he had no direct part in its execution. It was erected on a corner plot not far from the federal townhouse row where the architect grew up during the cooler months of the year, a short stroll from the Mississippi on which the Richardsons would travel upriver to the Priestley Plantation to avoid the summer heat and outbreaks of yellow fever.
However, Richardson’s fellow Louisianans need not have worried about memorializing him, since his architectural vocabulary was already broadly influential during his lifetime. Soon there were a multitude of firms that could do creditable knockoffs that to this day are often purported to have come from the master’s hand. One can find Richardsonian courthouses (to name but one widespread application of the style) in places as far-flung as Winona County, Minnesota; Wilkes County, Georgia; and Lewis and Clark County, Montana—each of which in some way descends from Richardson’s Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail of 1883–1888 in Pittsburgh. It might well be said that his conception of architecture helped unite the nation in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the United States coalesced into a sea-to-shining-sea colossus.
Unlike Classicism, which has so many rules that must be followed, Richardsonianism was freer and more individualistic, and in that respect better suited to the American self-image. And even when implemented at several removes from the originator, it retained the same qualities of stability, warmth, protection, and permanence that endeared it to H.H. Richardson’s contemporaries, and continues to do so among his admirers today.
