H. H. Richardson

The money that sent Richardson to Paris came out of Louisiana. His father traded cotton in New Orleans, and his mother's family grew sugar 60 miles upriver in St. James Parish, on a plantation that carried the family name and was worked by enslaved people. He was born there in 1838, a great-grandson of Joseph Priestley. A stammer cost him a West Point nomination, so he took Harvard instead, then sailed in 1860 as the second American admitted to the architecture division of the École des Beaux-Arts. The war cut off the remittances. He thought about going south to fight, let his Boston friends talk him out of it, refused to swear the loyalty oath anyway, and finished his training working for wages in a Paris office.

In 1872 he won the competition for Trinity Church in Boston and stopped being a promising young architect. His contemporaries imported their styles from Europe. What Richardson built at Trinity was his own: rough-faced granite, deep round arches, squat clustered columns, towers with real weight. He built it again at Sever and Austin Halls at Harvard, in New England town libraries, in nine stations for the Boston and Albany Railroad, and in the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail in Pittsburgh. In 1885 American architects named the ten best buildings in the country. Five were his.

He was ill through most of the years that made him. Bright's disease, chronic nephritis, swelled him past 300 pounds and left him working from a chair and then from his bed, and he kept taking commissions at the same pace anyway. Richardson died at his house in Brookline on April 27, 1886, aged 47. On the last day he signed an informal will telling the three assistants still with him to carry on the business. The two buildings he liked best, the Allegheny County Courthouse and the Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago, were both finished without him. He had earned an enormous income for an architect of his day, kept no order in his accounts, and left a widow and six children in debt.

His three remaining draftsmen reorganized the office as Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, finished some two dozen projects he had left, and kept working in his manner for years. So did everyone else. Rough stone arches and squat columns went up on courthouses, town halls, libraries and depots across the country, and on railway stations in Sweden and public buildings in Finland. Louis Sullivan set the Marshall Field store apart from everything else in Chicago as the one building that was alive, and Frank Lloyd Wright took his lesson from the Glessner House. Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer's authorized life of him appeared in 1888 and never said whether the family he was born into owned the people who worked its land.

H. H. Richardson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Buffalo State Asylum (Richardson Olmsted Complex) building
  The largest commission of his career and the first appearance of the style — grounds by Frederick Law Olmsted 1869
• Trinity Church, Boston building
  Won by competition in 1872 and built to 1877 — the work that made his national reputation 1877
• Sever Hall, Harvard University building
  One of the five Richardson buildings in the 1885 architects' poll of the country's ten best 1880
• Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy building
  Generally taken as the best of the small New England libraries that fixed his style 1882
• Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Chicago building
  Seven stories of stone filling a city block — demolished in 1930, and the building Sullivan and Wright took most from 1887
• Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh building
  One of the two buildings he liked best, finished by his assistants after his death 1888

• September 29, 1838 aged 0 Born on the Priestley plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana His father traded cotton in New Orleans. Through his mother he was a great-grandson of Joseph Priestley.
• 1859 aged ~21 Graduates from Harvard, after a stammer cost him a West Point nomination
• 1860 aged ~22 Enters the École des Beaux-Arts as the second American in its architecture division Richard Morris Hunt was the first. Richardson worked in the atelier of Louis-Jules André.
• 1862 aged ~24 The Union blockade of New Orleans cuts off his family's money He took paid work as a draughtsman in Paris offices and could rarely spare the two months a school competition took.
• October 1865 aged 27 Returns to the United States and settles in New York He found work with Charles D. Gambrill, whom he had met in Paris.
• January 3, 1867 aged 28 Marries Julia Gorham Hayden in Boston They had six children.
• 1872 aged ~34 Wins the competition for Trinity Church in Boston Built to 1877 with the Norcross Brothers, with whom he worked on some 30 projects.
• 1885 aged ~47 American architects name the ten best buildings in the country and five are his Trinity Church, Albany City Hall, Sever Hall, the New York State Capitol as a collaboration, and Oakes Ames Memorial Hall.
• April 27, 1886 aged 47 Dies of Bright's disease at 47 in Brookline, Massachusetts That day he signed an informal will directing his three remaining assistants to carry on the office.

• Louis Sullivan 1856–1924
  Architect whose skyscraper designs and “form follows function” principle helped define modern architecture. influenced
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. influenced
• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. collaborated with
• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. influenced
• Louis Kahn 1901–1974
  The Salk Institute, the Kimbell and the National Assembly at Dhaka, from an architect who began at 50. influenced