Henry Hobson Richardson, Master Builder & Architect

Henry Hobson Richardson, born near New Orleans on September 29, 1838, educated in Boston and Paris, and later settled near Boston, was one of the greatest architects in American history, valued both for the quality of his own work and for its massive influence on architecture in the United States. His designs were built throughout the East and Midwest, as far west as Wyoming, and also in Argentina and England. He designed government buildings, commercial buildings, hotels, libraries, schools, hospitals, churches, railroad stations, railroad carriages, bridges, monuments, and residences. His adaptation of Romanesque architecture produced some of the most powerful and imaginative buildings of the 19th century, while his residential work revived American Colonial vernacular forms and transformed Colonial formalism into the open plan of Shingle Style and Arts & Crafts domestic design. Richardson often collaborated with decorative artist John La Farge and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, and major later firms including McKim, Mead and White, Longfellow, Alden and Harlow, and Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge originated in his office. Buildings such as the Glessner and McVeigh homes and the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago influenced Louis Sullivan and, through him, Frank Lloyd Wright, while architects across the country adapted Trinity Church in Boston, the Allegheny County Courthouse, and Richardson’s residential designs into a Richardsonian Romanesque style. Emmanuel Church, his final ecclesiastical design, was commissioned in late 1883 or early 1884. After Richardson submitted a stone church design with a central tower in April 1884, estimated to cost more than $48,000, the vestry requested a less expensive plan costing between $12 and $15,000. A revised design was submitted in February 1885, the building was completed in early 1886, and it was dedicated on March 7, 1886. The church’s exterior is regarded as one of his finest surviving brick designs, and its interior has not been significantly altered since 1908, when a glass mosaic reredos by Leake and Greene was installed; its art glass windows are by Leake and Greene and Tiffany Studios.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · United States