Henry Hobson Richardson

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), one of the most successful and influential American architects of the 19th century, who inaugurated the Romanesque revival in the United States and, through his later designs, prefigured the modern movement in architecture.

Born September 29, 1838, in St James Parish, Louisiana, Richardson graduated (1859) from Harvard College; he then became the second American to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he absorbed the rationalism of French architectural planning. His first significant commission in the United States was the Church of the Unity (1866) in Springfield, Massachusetts, designed in a somewhat conventional Victorian Gothic style. His American reputation was established with Trinity Church (1872-1877) in Boston, designed in a massive Romanesque style derived from Richardson's study of medieval French churches. He subsequently used this style—characterized by deep entrance arches, bands or groupings of windows, and a sensitive use of various types and textures of stone and brick—in other churches, as well as in university halls, railway stations, and even in a monumental Piranesian jail (1885-1888, Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Concurrently, he also designed houses in the innovative wooden shingle style, later popularized by Charles McKim and Stanford White. These residences, such as the ornate, gabled Watts Herman House (1874), Newport, Rhode Island, emphasized comfort and convenience in their asymmetrical façades and open floor plans.

His influence was particularly profound in Chicago. His Marshall Field Wholesale Store and Warehouse (1887; demolished 1930) was a classic monument of driving American commercialism and of functionalism. Built of severe, unornamented stone, it occupied an entire city block. His Glessner House (completed 1887, Chicago) was a stone residential building in an analogous style—cool, plain, and austere, but pragmatic, convenient, and well planned. These two buildings were direct inspirations for the rationalist Chicago School of architecture and its leader Louis Sullivan. Richardson died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on April 27, 1886, at the height of his career.