H.H. Richardson

H.H. Richardson (born September 29, 1838, Priestley Plantation, Louisiana, U.S.—died April 27, 1886, Brookline, Massachusetts) was an American architect, the initiator of the Romanesque revival in the United States and a pioneer figure in the development of an indigenous, modern American style of architecture.

Richardson was the great-grandson of the discoverer of oxygen, Joseph Priestley. His distinguished pedigree and his own affability made his move from the South to Harvard University in 1855 as easy as it was eventually to be rewarding. Harvard then offered more in personal contacts than in intellectual stimulation, and Richardson’s later clients, such as Henry Adams, were largely drawn from the Porcellian Club and other social circles that he entered with ease. He never returned to the South.

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Sometime during his Harvard days Richardson decided to become an architect. In Boston he was surrounded by buildings of plain granite design that affected the best of his own later work, but for formal training he had to go abroad, for there were no schools of architecture in the United States before the Civil War. Fluent in French from his Louisiana childhood, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1860 to 1862, when the Civil War at home cut off his income. He then worked in the office of the French architect Théodore Labrouste until he returned to the United States in October 1865. In Paris he mastered the analytical architectural planning that characterizes much of his mature work and that was formulated by his friend, the architect and École professor Julien Guadet, in his Éléments et théorie de l’architecture (1902).

Richardson returned to America with every expectation of quick success, for he was among the best trained architects in the country and had many important connections. In November 1866 he was awarded his first commission, the Church of the Unity in Springfield, Massachusetts (now demolished). His career launched, Richardson married Julia Gorham Hayden of Boston on January 3, 1867. They moved into a house of his own design (now altered) on Staten Island, New York, where five of his six children were born. Richardson’s neighbour was Frederick Law Olmsted, the journalist and renowned landscape architect with whom he later frequently collaborated.

Richardson lived and worked in New York City for the next eight years, forming in 1867 a partnership with the architect Charles D. Gambrill that lasted 11 years but was never more than one of administrative convenience. From his Manhattan office and the drafting board in his Staten Island home came the drawings for the early commissions in Springfield, the State Asylum for the Insane in Buffalo, New York (designed 1870–72), and the Brattle Square (1870–72) and Trinity (1872–77) churches in Boston. Designed for the renowned preacher Phillips Brooks, Trinity was one of the most important Episcopal churches in America. Richardson’s Romanesque revival design won him a national reputation, many imitators, and so many New England commissions that it became desirable to move to the Boston area. In 1874 he bought a house in suburban Brookline, Massachusetts, and added to it his office and studio.

During these later years Richardson produced the buildings upon which his reputation principally rests. He designed houses, community libraries, suburban railroad stations, educational buildings, and commercial and civic structures. Instead of the splintered massing, narrow vertical proportions, and disparate Gothic features used by his contemporaries, he favoured horizontal lines, simple silhouettes, and uniform large-scale details of Romanesque or Byzantine inspiration. Since his best commercial structure, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago (1885–87), and most of his railroad stations in the northeastern United States were demolished long ago, the development of Richardson’s work in the last years of his life can now best be studied at Sever (1878–80) and Austin (1880–84) halls at Harvard University, at the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail (1884–87) in Pittsburgh, at the Glessner House in Chicago (1885–87), or in the series of libraries in the small towns around Boston, from Woburn and North Easton to Quincy and Malden. The Crane Memorial Library in Quincy, Massachusetts (1880–82), with its tripartite layering of a rough-faced granite base beneath continuous clerestory windows topped with a tiled gable roof and its cavernous entrance arch, stands with the finest and most characteristic works of his maturity. Richardson’s Romanesque style had an integrity seldom achieved by his many imitators in the latter part of the 19th century. Moreover, the functionalism of his designs and his expressive use of materials presaged the revolutionary work of Louis Sullivan.

Richardson suffered throughout his career from chronic nephritis, or Bright’s disease, but nevertheless he worked at a strenuous pace. He died in 1886 at the top of his profession and with major buildings rising in Boston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Ohio, Chicago, and St. Louis. He left it to his successors, the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, to finish these and to the Chicago architects Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to carry on in the direction he had initiated.