Henry Hobson Richardson

Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) was an American architect, born on a plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana. After Harvard he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1860, the second American to enter its architecture section. He practiced in New York and later in Brookline, Massachusetts, and died of Bright's disease, a kidney illness, at 47. The style he developed is named after him: Richardsonian Romanesque.

Richardson drew on the Romanesque churches of 11th- and 12th-century France and Spain. He built in rough-faced stone, often in two colors, with wide round arches, short columns, deep-set windows in bands, and towers with conical or pyramid-shaped roofs. Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston (1872-1877) has a Greek-cross plan, with four equal arms, around a central tower 64 meters high modeled on the Old Cathedral of Salamanca in Spain. In an 1885 survey of American architects it ranked as the most important building in the United States.

His Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh (1883-1888) and Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago (1885-1887, demolished in 1930) have heavy stone walls with tiers of arched windows; the Chicago store influenced Louis Sullivan. He also designed the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, Massachusetts (1880-1882), and the John J. Glessner House in Chicago (1885-1887).