Characterized by soaring towers, dramatic arches, and massive, rough-hewn red sandstone masonry, Henry Hobson Richardson was the first American architect to introduce a style that became so popular it was named after its originator.

From the looming colossus of Buffalo Psychiatric Center, to the demur French inspired Dorsheimer house, Buffalo is home to the biggest and the final commissions of Richardson's career. Richardson was brought to Buffalo by William Dorsheimer who served as member of Congress and Lieutenant Governor of New York State.

Buffalo Psychiatric Center Complex - (built 1870-1871)
Forest Avenue Buffalo, New York

Richardson-Olmsted Complex

Dorsheimer House - (built 1869-1871)
434-438 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, New York

Richardson was born at Priestly Plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana and went to study at Harvard College. Initially he was interested in civil engineering, but eventually shifted to architecture which led him to go to Paris in 1860 to attend the famed Ecole des Beaux Arts. He didn't finish his training there as family backing failed during the U.S. Civil War. Nonetheless, he was only the second US citizen to attend the Ecole - a school which was to play an increasingly important role in training Americans in the following decades. Richardson returned to the U.S. in 1865. The style that Richardson favored, however, was not the more classical style of the Ecole, but a more medieval-inspired style, influenced by William Morris, John Ruskin and others. Richardson developed a unique idiom, however, improvising in particular upon the Romanesque of southern France. The term "Richardsonian Romanesque" has sometimes misled people to assess it as one of the Victorian revival styles, akin, perhaps to Neo-Gothic, but it was actually much more personal, a synthesizing of the Beaux-Arts predilection for clear and legible plans with the heavy massing that was favored by the pro-medievalists. Richardson's work thus stands out for its innovativeness and for this some historians, Nicholas Pevsner for example, have argued that it constitutes a type of break from naive historicism and was thus quasi proto modern. But this interpretation depends to a large extent on the definition of modernism. Nonetheless, significant to Richardson's style was his picturesque massing and roofline profiles, along with his mastery of rustication and polychromy. When you see an 1880s building with massive rusticated,semi-circular arches supported on clusters of squat columns, round arches over clusters of windows on massive walls, you are seeing Richardsonian Romanesque.

If a single work of Richardson's had to be selected over others it would have to be Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston, part of one of the outstanding American urban complexes built as the center piece of the newly developed Back Bay. The Boston Public Library was built across from it later by Richardson's former draftsman, Charles Follen McKim. The interior of the church is one of the leading examples of the Arts and crafts aesthetics in the US.

A series of small public libraries donated by patrons for the improvement of New England towns makes a small coherent corpus that defines Richardson's style: libraries in Woburn, North Easton (illustration, right), Malden, Massachusetts, and the very fine Thomas Crane Public Library (Quincy, Massachusetts). These buildings seem resolutely anti-modern, with the aura of an Episcopalian vicarage, dimly lit for solemnity rather than reading on site. They are preserves of culture that did not especially embrace the contemporary flood of newcomers to New England. Yet they offer clearly defined spaces, easy and natural circulation, and they are visually memorable. Richardson's libraries found many imitators in the "Richardsonian Romanesque" movement. Richardson had a frequent collaborator in Frederick Law Olmsted who devised the landscaping schemes for half a dozen of his projects.

Buffalo's New York State Asylum (1870) was the largest building of the master's career and the first to display his characteristic style. The complex was also the first of many projects on which he worked with Frederick Law Olmsted.

Richardson's work was contemporary with the residential Queen Anne style, with which his work had little affinity, except for the species known as the "Shingle Style," which evidenced his sense of massing and picturesque composition.

Richardson died in 1886 at age 48. He was buried in Walnut Hills Cemetery, Brookline, Massachusetts. Following his death, the style that he had pioneered was picked up by a variety of other architects whose works are grouped under the name of Richardsonian Romanesque. The style was applied to various types of buildings, churches, public buildings such as city halls, county buildings, court houses, train stations and libraries, as well as residences. Stanford White and Charles Follen McKim, who each worked in his office as young men, and who went on to form the noted firm McKim, Mead and White, moved into a different, historicist Beaux-Arts mode style that became the norm around the turn of the twentieth century, replacing the Richardsonian Romanesque. Nonetheless, Richardsonian lessons of texture, massing, and the expressive language of stone walling can be felt in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Richardson found sympathetic reception among young Scandinavian architects of the following generation, the one known best in the English-speaking world being Eliel Saarinen.

What is impressive about Richardson's architecture is that he is one of the few to be immortalized by having the honor of having a style named after him. 'Richardson Romanesque' is traditionally used to describe the unique buildings that he was responsible for. Richardson has been viewed as one of the most important architects in American nineteenth century history because his work was well received and highly popular. Evidence that he was received as an influential nineteenth century architect comes in the face that five of his buildings were used in the 1885 American architects list of ten best buildings.