Richardsonian Romanesque

Richardsonian Romanesque buildings have heavy walls of rusticated stone (rough-faced blocks), often in two contrasting colors. Entrances are wide round arches set deep into the facade, often springing from clusters of short, thick columns. Windows are grouped in recessed bands or arcades, roofs are steep, and many buildings have round towers with conical roofs. Masses are simple, and the surfaces vary in texture rather than carrying applied ornament.

Examples include Trinity Church in Boston (1872-1877), the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh (1883-1888), which is joined to its jail by a covered stone bridge, and the Glessner House in Chicago (1886-1887). Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store in Chicago (1885-1887, demolished 1930) applied the style to a seven-story commercial building with rows of round arches several floors tall. Smaller versions appear in town libraries, railroad stations and county courthouses across the Midwest.

The style is named after Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), the second American to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He drew on the 11th- and 12th-century Romanesque churches of southern France, Spain and Italy. His Buffalo State Asylum, now the Richardson Olmsted Complex, begun in 1870, used early versions of these forms, and Trinity Church in Boston, built 1872-1877, established the style.

Through the 1880s the style spread west from Boston as other architects adopted it for courthouses, libraries, churches and university buildings, and it reached as far as bank buildings in Osage County, Oklahoma (1904-1911). Richardson died in 1886, before the Allegheny County Courthouse and the Glessner House were finished. After the classical buildings of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Beaux-Arts classicism replaced it for most public commissions. Its simple massing and arcaded walls influenced Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and architects in Sweden and Finland also adopted it.