Foremost among nineteenth-century American architects stands H. H. Richardson. While most frequently associated with his Romanesque-inspired Trinity Church (1872–77) in Boston, Richardson’s reach extends far beyond this rusticated masonry masterpiece.
Richardson’s oeuvre, accomplished during a relatively brief life (he died at age 47), contains a wealth of remarkable buildings that creatively fuse varied inspirations—European and American, historical and contemporary, natural and technological. His work established a foundation for modern architecture and influenced succeeding generations of architects, including Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Furthermore, his collaborative studio served as a training ground for the many promising young architects, such as Charles McKim and Stanford White, who later joined William Mead to establish the firm of McKim, Mead & White; and George Shepley, who carried the mantle of Richardson’s studio after the older architect’s death.
By virtue of his education, social relationships, and built work, Richardson maintained deep connections with Harvard University. Now, with Monacelli’s release of Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University, an additional touchpoint between the architect and university comes to light. This new publication, coauthored by Jay Wickersham (MArch ’84), Chris Milford, and Hope Mayo, reveals the richness and breadth of Richardson’s studio’s work. In advance of the book’s launch, marked by an event at Harvard’s Lamont Library on October 29, 2024, the GSD’s Krista Sykes talked with Wickersham about his own connections to Harvard and how this ambitious book came to exist.
Wickersham first learned of Richardson as a Yale University undergraduate in the mid-1970s, through the courses and writings of historian Vincent Scully. By the mid-1980s, after completing his architectural studies at the GSD, Wickersham started making trips with his colleague and soon-to-be collaborator Chris Milford to the Massachusetts town of North Easton, home to five buildings that Richardson had designed for the Ames family a century prior. Meanwhile, Wickersham earned a law degree from Harvard and began practicing design, construction, environmental, and land use law. A few decades later, while Wickersham was teaching a course on the history of professional practice at the GSD, he and Milford became active in Richardson-related preservation efforts. They also ramped up their research, coauthoring an article together about the continuation of Richardson’s practice after his death. These endeavors set the stage for the current debut of Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library.
Krista Sykes: How did you decide to focus on Richardson’s drawings for this project?
Jay Wickersham: Through our earlier Richardson research and preservation work, we came to know Jim O’Gorman, the great expert on Richardson. In 2019, Jim suggested that we explore and publish, for the first time, Richardson’s archival drawings that are in Harvard’s Houghton Library. So Chris and I started working with our collaborator Hope Mayo. As the recently retired Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at Houghton Library, Hope was very familiar with the collection, and she brought a wealth of knowledge to our efforts.
It took us five years to go through the full collection. We looked at every single drawing. There were over 4,000 drawings with more than 100 projects represented. The material had been roughly cataloged by project. Yet within each project, the drawings were only gathered by type—plan, section, elevation, perspective, detail, or site plan. No efforts had been made to organize them according to the process of the design, which we set out to do.
This task was rather challenging because almost none of the drawings are dated, signed, or even initialed. We had to work from the evidence of the drawings themselves, starting at one end, if there were initial sketches by Richardson, and then from the other end, thinking about what the completed building looked like, making inferences to link drawings of similar style, looking at how the design had likely evolved. What could the drawings tell us about the course of design?
Furthermore, who made the drawings? Of the 4,000 drawings, only about 200 are from the hand of Richardson himself. In his collaborative studio, Richardson had a series of brilliant assistants, beginning with Charles McKim, followed by Stanford White, H. Langford Warren (who founded Harvard’s architecture program in 1893), Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, and then the last two, Charles Coolidge and George Shepley, who continued the firm after Richardson’s death. We examined outside evidence alongside the drawings themselves, trying to identify the hands involved.
A Richardsonian building is so recognizable. We wondered, though—how did he retain this consistent design approach and yet, at the same time, give opportunities to his assistants? We came to think of Richardson’s studio like a performing arts group, the way that the Duke Ellington Orchestra over time reflects different flavors of its namesake’s music, depending on a succession of brilliant soloists and collaborators.
Indeed, much of what Richardson was able to do stemmed from his close relationship with his collaborators. The Norcross brothers from Worcester, Massachusetts, who created the first major national construction company, built most of Richardson’s great buildings. He trusted them to do the detailing, and he allowed them some freedom in carrying out the design intent. Then there was John Evans, who had a decorative carving studio in Boston. Richardson’s drawings showed indications of the subjects for a building’s decorative carving program, allowing the Evans studio to carry them out with individuality and flair.
So the atelier model on which Richardson based his studio extends to his collaborators as well?
Very much so. He embraced the atelier model that Richardson experienced during his time at the École des Beaux-Arts. Yet he was equally imbued with the English Gothic Revival, with John Ruskin’s notion that decoration should derive from a building’s materials and methods of construction. Richardson also knew William Morris and his idea that the makers’ hands should be visible in the work. We view this as inherent with these collaborators, and even in the way that members of his studio could play with their own imagination in the buildings’ detailing. Our favorite element is for the Harvard Law School’s Austin Hall, where there are magnificent fireplaces in the classrooms. One day Richardson had a design charrette and asked everyone in the studio to design a set of andirons. There are 16 different andiron designs, each of them wonderfully playful. We’ve produced four of them in the book, another example of the richness that we’re trying to convey.
Could you say a bit about how you organized the material in the book?
In terms of essays, Jim has provided a framing article on Richardson’s biography, the large arc of his career, focusing on the design methods he learned at the École des Beaux-Arts. Chris and I have two essays: one is on the studio, how it operated, the key people within it, and the types of drawings it produced; the second is on Richardson’s clients and web of relationships, and his close friendships with Henry Adams and Frederick Law Olmsted, probably the two leading public intellectuals of post-Civil War America. Hope has written the first history of the archival collection, explaining its assemblage, how it got to Harvard, and all its diverse parts at Houghton and at the GSD’s Loeb Library. And for each building, we’ve provided a short introduction that outlines what to look for—a roadmap to the drawings.
With respect to drawings, the book highlights the scope of Richardson’s work, covered in a broad chronological arc from early to mid-period to late projects. And within that, we’ve organized it thematically, so you see how he tackled different building types and explored variations on a theme: major civic works, commercial office building, train stations, houses. Perhaps his greatest achievement is the series of five public libraries, where this new quintessentially democratic program is given a form that draws on European heritage and the American landscape. The extraordinary range and diversity in his work is something that we really wanted to convey.
How did Richardson’s archive come to Harvard?
Richardson was a Harvard undergraduate, class of 1859, and he later designed two major buildings for the campus—Sever Hall (1878–80) and Austin Hall (1880–84). Other people in the firm attended Harvard as well, and then the Shepley firm continued as the university’s architect up until the 1960s. But the firm kept the drawing collection in their own offices, which was in the Ames Building in downtown Boston.
Concerning the transfer of the archive to Harvard, there were two key events. First, after several decades of neglect, Richardson’s work gained renewed attention in the 1930s. Louis Mumford wrote about him in The Brown Decades of 1931, and then in 1936 Henry-Russell Hitchcock staged a show on Richardson at MoMA and published an accompanying monograph. These incidents brought Richardson back to prominence. And second, in 1942, Harvard opened Houghton Library, a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled library for rare books and manuscripts. So, the firm donated the entire collection of drawings to Houghton, where they have been ever since. They also gave over 50 albums of study photographs that the office had used for reference purposes, and Richardson’s surviving architectural library. The photo albums and the architectural library are at the Loeb Special Collections at the GSD.
There’s so much material in Richardson’s archive. How did you and your co-authors tackle it?
First, we consulted with Jim and did an initial pass. Then we started with the most prominent buildings that were the best documented and went back to fill in the additional ones. We also looked at high-quality reproductions of presentation drawings that Richardson’s office had made. Having done that, we did a rough cut for each building with two to three times the images we knew we could include. We then winnowed those down to our final cuts.
Next, we worked with the library to produce high-quality, full-color digital images of the selected drawings. In all, they account for just over 10 percent of the archive; about 450 drawings are in the book, plus several archival photographs. Those now exist as high-grade digital images for future scholars, who can use the book as a guide for going back into the archive.
Throughout the creation of the book, did anything stand out as a welcome surprise?
We’re quite happy that, through the design and reproduction process, the tactile quality of these fragile archival documents was retained. You can see the irregularities, the stains and creases and tears in the drawings, the different colors of background paper. The images allow you to see the designs themselves while still conveying the sense of these drawings as physical objects.
It was also fascinating to see the quality of the drawings, particularly when we got to the working drawings. They’re ink on vellum, with a soft watercolor wash on the back of the vellum to indicate materials—so gray for stone, pink for masonry, yellow for wood. The working drawings are in themselves very beautiful graphically.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Richardson no doubt saw his share of changing circumstances in terms of cultural shifts, scientific development, and more.
Oh, certainly. In fact, Richardson and the studio were very attuned to the latest technological innovations. The idea that he was just a masonry architect who was not technologically enterprising is a real misapprehension. In the drawings we found a lot of evidence to the contrary, and we tried to convey this in the book. You’ll see that we’ve included a remarkable bird’s-eye perspective of the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail set in the degraded environment of Pittsburgh, showing the surrounding smoking chimneys and the cloud of air pollution enveloping the city. With this image, you understand the complex’s big central tower provided clean, purified air for the building. It was intended to be tall enough to bring in fresh air, which was drawn down by large fans into the basement, filtered, humidified, and then conducted up through ducts in the walls into the courtrooms and the offices.
Before we conclude, could you summarize the overarching goals that guided you and your coauthors through the book’s creation?
First, we saw Richardson’s work as a window into the act of design, underscoring how design is not, as architects know, a linear process. This is at the heart of the book. Also, we hoped to dispel the idea of Richardson—or any great architect—as a lone figure. Architecture is made collaboratively, which becomes clear as we talk about Richardson’s studio as well as the connections with people like the Norcross brothers and Evans. Maybe the third idea relates to back in the 1930s when Mumford and Hitchcock helped rediscover Richardson’s work, and then more recently, Scully and O’Gorman. Richardson has been a source of revitalization for architecture at various points, and we hope there will be new ways in which he can provide inspiration going forward.
*Unless otherwise noted, illustrations are courtesy of the H. H. Richardson Drawings Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.