RICHARDSON, Henry Hobson

(1838-1886)

   Henry Hobson Richardson was the second American-born architect to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, after Richard Morris Hunt. Richardson was born in Louisiana and studied first at Harvard and then in Paris. He worked in many styles during his career but is best known for his adaptation of the Romanesque, which came to be called the "Richardsonian Romanesque." Although many private homes feature this Romanesque style with its red brick exterior walls and heavily rusticated red stone around doorways and windows, Richardson's most famous buildings in this style are his public structures in Boston and Chicago. Richardson's Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston, was built after the Great Fire destroyed part of the city in 1872. The monumental church features a Greek-cross plan with a central square tower at the crossing. The façade was originally flat with front towers, but Richardson later added a highly sculptural porch modeled on the Romanesque Church of Saint-Trophime in Arles, France. Trinity Church epitomizes the Richardsonian Romanesque with its heavily rusticated stone walls, round arches, square towers, and the use of pink granite, red sandstone, and a red clay roof.

   In Chicago, Richardson was hired to build the Marshall Field Warehouse in 1885-1887 (demolished in the 1930s). This commercial building revealed a balance between subtle historicism, as seen in the rusticated stone and arched windows that recalled a Florentine Renaissance palace, and a cleaner, more modern design devoid of columns and porticoes. The building suggested solidity in its use of granite and sandstone together with its wide corner piers and the beautiful rhythm seen in the rows of small rectangular and larger arched windows. Since the city of Chicago was still recovering from its Fire of 1871, many new buildings were being constructed, yet it was Richardson's warehouse that set the standard for the next generation of architects in Chicago, called the "Chicago School."

   See also SKYSCRAPER.