Richardson v. Richardsonian

Henry Hobson Richardson died of Bright's disease on April 27, 1886, two years after the first steel frame building had been erected in Chicago. Unlike his admirer, the late Louis Sullivan (TIME, Dec. 9), Richardson had nothing to do with the development of the skyscraper, but because he was the most important U. S. architect of the 19th Century, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week hung a gigantic portrait of him in its lobby, published a scholarly critique of his work,* and displayed photographs and plans of his most important buildings all over the ground floor.

Few U. S. schoolboys have ever heard of H. H. Richardson. If they have eyes to see, though, they cannot help being aware of the type of architecture he popularized; if they are schoolboys of taste they view it with alarm. No man was ever more betrayed by his imitators. What the trade knew as "Richardsonian Romanesque" are the banks, schools, churches, libraries, jails which still dot the land, built of the knobbiest of rough-cut masonry, with livid tile roofs, arched windows and a profusion of useless squat towers. What his admirers have never ceased to point out is that Richardson himself was very seldom Richardsonian. His best buildings: the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago, Harvard's Sever Hall, the Albany City Hall, Boston's Brattle Square Church ("The Church of the Holy Bean Blowers"). These were heavyset, impressive buildings befitting a stolid age, but all were well-planned, magnificently proportioned and still serve as an inspiration to young architects.

H. H. Richardson really knew very little about Romanesque architecture. His ornament was original, more often Syrian than Romanesque. In all his churches the object most admired by the public-at-large, the tower of Boston's Trinity Church, was not designed by Richardson at all. It was an adaptation by the slickest of exterior decorators, the late Stanford White, then a draughtsman in the Richardson office, of the lantern of Salamanca Cathedral, added when Trinity's builders announced that they were unable to execute Richardson's more original first design.

Born in St. James Parish, La. in 1838, Henry Hobson Richardson went to Harvard when his stuttering kept him from a West Point appointment. He was the second famed U. S. architect to study his profession in Paris.* Once back in his native country his success as an architect was rapid. Rebelling against the General Grant era of architecture, he won competitions right & left while his prize-winning designs brought in other commissions. One of his least successful, most "Richardsonian" buildings, the New York State Capitol, was the cause of a great scandal. He was called in as architect after graft and mismanagement had used $7,000,000 of public funds and only carried the original design of Architects Arthur D. Gilman and Thomas Fuller through the first floor. The graft continued. The handsome metal ceiling that Richardson designed for the Senate Chamber was secretly executed in papier-mache by a political contractor.

Romantically slim and handsome in his youth, Henry Hobson Richardson grew into a great bearded barrel of a man (see cut p. 29), proud of his wife and six children, his combined home and office, his vast capacity for champagne and the bright yellow vests he wore with evening clothes. Though he built several churches he was by no means a religious man. In fact at dinner one evening his good friend Phillips Brooks, rector of Boston's Trinity, was abashed to learn that Architect Richardson had never read the Bible. Architect Richardson promised to do so. started at Genesis, read straight on through the night. At breakfast next morning he lustily hailed his family:

"I have been reading the Bible, and it's the damnedest most interesting book I ever read in my life!"

*The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr.-- Museum of Modern Art ($6). *The First: Richard Morris Hunt.

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