Sunday September 29, 2013 will mark the 175th
anniversary of the birth of Glessner House architect Henry Hobson
Richardson. The event will be marked
with a lecture on Richardson’s influence in Chicago entitled “H. H. Richardson
and his Chicago Legacy” that afternoon at 2:00pm in the coach house of the
museum. The presenter will be
architectural historian John Waters, who will explore Richardson’s body of work
and the influence it had on architects including Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd
Wright, and Henry Ives Cobb. (As a
special treat, attendees will receive a piece of birthday cake – the same
celebrated recipe for strawberry shortcake that Richardson called the “best
ever” when he dined with the Glessners in May 1885). For reservations or more information, call
312.326.1480.
In celebration of Richardson’s birth, we present
a brief biography and overview of his works from the exhibit “Henry Hobson
Richardson: Architect of the Glessner House” on permanent display in the
visitor’s center of the museum. The exhibit
text was written by James F. O’Gorman, professor emeritus in the Wellesley
College Department of Arts, and the author of several books on Richardson and
his contemporaries, including H. H.
Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society and Living Architecture: A Biography of H. H.
Richardson.
Church of the Unity, Springfield, MA
BIOGRAPHY
H.
H. Richardson (1838-1886) is a pioneer figure in the development of an American
style of architecture. Born on a Louisiana sugar
plantation, he grew up in the American section of New Orleans. His mother was the granddaughter
of Joseph Priestley, celebrated eighteenth-century Unitarian clergyman and
chemist often credited with the discovery of oxygen; his father was a dealer in
real estate, cotton, and slaves. Turned down by West Point
because of a stutter, he entered Harvard
College, graduating in
1859. He proved an indifferent scholar but a popular classmate. Elected to the
Porcellian, an exclusive collegiate social club, much of his subsequent career
rested on the contacts he made at college including future clients Henry Adams
and Philips Brooks.
In
1860 he became the second American architect to attend the École des Beaux-Arts
in Paris, then the leading architectural school in the Western world. The fall
of New Orleans
to Union troops in 1862 cutoff funds from home
and prematurely ended his studies, so he found work at the office of Théodore
Labrouste, an important government architect. Richardson’s Parisian education thus combined
theoretical exercises with practical experience. He absorbed the French system
of balanced planning but rejected its classical forms.
At
the end of the Civil War he returned to the States, married Julia Gorham Hayden
of Boston, and moved into a mansard-roofed house of his own design on Staten
Island, New York. He formed a partnership of convenience with Charles Dexter
Gambrill, and designed his first building, the Church of the Unity in Springfield, Massachusetts,
in 1866. During this time he also collaborated with the pioneering landscape
architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, to prepare a master plan for Staten Island.
Richardson’s
career lasted just twenty years, and from 1874 until his death twelve years
later, he worked out of a studio behind his residence in Brookline, a suburb of
Boston. There he set up an office on the French atelier system, drawing
assistants from the recently established school of architecture at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His office produced several prominent
architects including Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White, two of the major
architects of the next generation. A summer trip in 1882 to the Auvergne and other
medieval sites in France,
Spain,
and Italy
confirmed his choice of Romanesque as the basis for a personal style, which in
time became known as Richardsonian Romanesque.
His fresh approach to those robust forms marked his later buildings,
many of which were erected by Norcross Brothers of Worcester, Massachusetts.
Richardson
was a hail-fellow-well-met, a man’s man who, as a New York Senator once stated,
could “charm a bird out of a bush.” But
his gargantuan appearance (John Glessner estimated his weight at 370 pounds)
masked a deadly malady, Bright’s disease, which killed him at the age of
forty-seven. Philips Brooks likened his passing to the “vanishing of a great
mountain from the landscape.” The study of his life and work, written by
Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, appeared in 1888 and was the first book
devoted to an American architect. It did
much to spread the knowledge and influence of the Richardsonian Romanesque far
beyond New England.
Trinity Church, Boston, MA
MAJOR
WORKS
Richardson became the most admired
architect in the country as the result of a number of significant buildings
designed during the last fifteen years of his life. Five of his buildings
appeared on an 1885 national survey of the ten best buildings of the United
States picked by his fellow architects. Trinity
Church headed the list. He also found followers across the United States
and as far afield as England,
Finland,
and Australia.
He was the first American architect to have such a wide influence and respect
abroad.
What
Richardson called his free interpretation of the Romanesque style first
occurred in his masterwork, Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston, a
commission he won in competition in 1872. Rejecting the thin walled Gothic
Revival style with its pointed arches, then popular for Episcopal churches, he
designed a vast open auditorium for the charismatic preacher Philips Brooks.
The interior is a broad centralized space rising amid chancel, shallow
transepts, and a shortened nave with round-arched wooden vaults. Its colorful
thick walls, brilliant stained glass, and rich acoustics add to the special
quality of the space. This shaping of the interior created an exterior that is
a pyramid of rough hewn granite with contrasting sandstone trim capped by a
massive, squat tower. The effect is that of a “mighty fortress.” It remains
high on the list of major architectural achievements.
In
following years Richardson created seminal works, both private and public, for
cities, suburbs, and the commuter lines connecting them. For suburban or
country houses he looked to geology for inspiration, piling glacial boulders
into organic forms, or wrapping the structures in wooden shingles. His addition
to the Robert Treat Paine house in Waltham,
Massachusetts, looks as if it
were emerging from the ground like an outcropping. His gate lodge for the Ames estate in North Easton, Massachusetts,
seems a man-made glacial moraine. For small towns around Boston he designed granite faced public
libraries and railroad depots, the latter capped with sheltering hip roofs that
spread out to create ground-hugging shapes.
Among
his later buildings, Richardson rated the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as the most important. A major city commission
built of granite with round-arched openings and a tall tower, it radiated the
“majesty of the law,” according to a local historian. The unarticulated wall
surrounding the jail yard may be the most impressive run of stonework in the
country; its low sprung arch with its seven-foot voussoirs is among the most
powerful ever built, and served as the big brother of the 18th Street entrance of
Glessner house.
Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Chicago, IL
IMPACT ON
CHICAGO
Richardson’s influence on Chicago architecture was
as strong as it was elsewhere. His major Chicago
works, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store and the Glessner and MacVeagh houses,
created powerful images of solid rusticated granite walls, round-arched
architecture, and disciplined geometry in contrast to the caprice of the
pointed Victorian Gothic. His example inspired many of the late
nineteenth-century designers who shaped the architectural image of the city.
Just
prior to Richardson’s death, he assigned his office to three of his assistants,
and the new partnership, named Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, produced major
commissions across the country as well as local iconic landmarks including the
Art Institute and the former public library (now the Chicago Cultural Center).
Under the name Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott, the Boston-based firm
continues to occupy an important place in contemporary American architecture
Louis
Sullivan owned a copy of Van Rensselaer’s book on Richardson’s work, and his
local buildings loomed large in Sullivan’s mind. The Marshall Field Wholesale
Store had a great affect on him in particular.
In that building, Richardson
conceived a blockbuster structure, a building which “in massiveness, simplicity
of lines, and . . . blending of artistic beauty with adaptability to its
purpose” was unrivalled according to a contemporary critic. The architect
Rudolf Schindler said it stood out from nearby works “like a meteor from
another planet.” A four-square block of red Missouri granite articulated with
the architect’s signature half-round arches, it echoed the gridiron plan of the
city.
For Sullivan, it was an “oasis” among its
neighboring buildings which seemed a “host of stage-struck-wobbling mockeries,”
as he wrote in Kindergarten Chats. He
adapted the scheme of its façades for his Auditorium Building
(now Roosevelt University), and in later buildings such
as the Stock Exchange, he continued to use the masonry arched forms of the
Richardsonian Romanesque. The salvaged archway entrance to the Stock Exchange
near the Art Institute is as much a tribute to Richardson’s influence on the architects of
the city as it is to Sullivan.
Under
the influence of Sullivan and Van Rensselaer’s book on Richardson, the young
Frank Lloyd Wright was also taken with the older man’s buildings, especially
the organic qualities of his suburban work, which, although he was loath to
admit it, Wright adapted to his own early domestic designs. His Heurtley house
in Oak Park,
for example, recalls the organizational scheme of Richardson’s Crane Memorial Library in Quincy, Massachusetts.
As late as 1949, Wright’s entrance to the V. C. Morris Shop in San Francisco reprised the form of the
interrupted archway of the 18th
Street entry at Glessner house.
Other
Chicago architects also looked at Richardson’s accomplishments. The exterior of
Burnham and Root’s Rookery reflects knowledge of his arched style, as does
their now-demolished Masonic
Temple.
Massachusetts-born and M.I.T.-trained Henry Ives Cobb adapted the Richardsonian
Romanesque to a number of local works, including the original Chicago
Historical Society building (Dearborn and Ontario), the Newberry Library, and
the houses at 1811 and 2110 South Prairie Avenue.
GLESSNER
HOUSE
Richardson’s Glessner house is
among his finest works. Begun in 1885 and finished in 1887 by his successor
firm, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, the house demonstrates the courage of John
and Frances Glessner to commission such an unconventional house, for it was
generally misunderstood and disliked by their neighbors when first completed.
John
Jacob Glessner, one of the founders of International Harvester, a farm
equipment company, was deeply involved in the civic and cultural affairs of
Chicago. He served as president of the
Citizen’s Association, the Commercial Club, and Rush Medical
College, and as a trustee
of the Chicago Orchestral Association and the Art Institute. Frances Macbeth
Glessner was active in Chicago
as well. Among her social and
philanthropic commitments were Fortnightly of Chicago and the Society of
Decorative Arts. She was also an
accomplished pianist, silversmith, embroiderer, and beekeeper. An extensive search for an architect led the
couple to Richardson, who provided them with an ideal winter home on Prairie Avenue in
which they resided from October through May each year.
Clients
and architect were ill-matched in personality; the Glessners were conventional
while Richardson was flamboyant. Yet they became fast friends and formed a
virtually perfect client-architect relationship. While dining together the day after first
visiting their Prairie Avenue
site, Richardson
quickly sketched the L-shaped plan of the house. With a few practical changes,
that is the plan of the house as built. The ultimate design rested on Richardson’s
interpretation of such European precedents as the tithe barn at Abingdon Abbey
in England
(a picture of which the Glessners owned), and the Manoir d’Ango in Normandy (a photograph
of which the architect had on file).
John Glessner later recorded that “from what (Richardson) told me and
what his young men said afterwards, I am convinced that this house of ours is
the one of all that he built that he would have liked most to live in himself.”
The
austere north side of Glessner house, with its minimal window openings, rises
from the street-side edge of the property and provides a stark contrast to the
courtyard elevation with its large windows that provide an abundance of natural
light to the interior. Its exterior design marked it as unique among the homes
on fashionable Prairie Avenue.
The Glessner house sits low and solid on the ground while the other houses rose
high and gaunt atop steep steps. The walls of rusticated granite laid in
continuous horizontal courses stood in marked contrast to the numerous
small-scale and polychromed details of the neighboring houses. Richardson’s delight in “massive and quiet”
architecture found its full expression in the Glessner house.
The
library of the home was inspired by Richardson’s own office in Brookline. The
interior appointments of the house reflect the dawning Arts and Crafts Movement
inspired by the designer and theorist William Morris in England. Richardson had visited
Morris in 1882 and became one of the bearers of this new movement to America.
Textiles, wallpaper, and furniture by Morris grace the interior, while dining
room furniture designed by Charles Coolidge of Richardson’s office and a piano case by
Francis Bacon (all made by A. H. Davenport of Boston) stamp the house as a precursor to the
flood of craftwork that was to mark the turn of the twentieth century.
Richardson dressed in monk's robes
JOHN
GLESSNER ON RICHARDSON
“He
was the most versatile, interesting, ready, capable and confident of artists,
the most genial and agreeable of companions.
Everybody was attracted to him at sight. . . All of his work was stamped
with his individuality. It had great
influence upon contemporary architecture and that which immediately followed,
and his early death was a distinct loss to this country.”
