Hh Richardson Research Paper

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H.H. Richardson was born September 29, 1838 at Priestly Plantation in Louisiana. As a young man, he studied one year at Tulane University and later at Harvard. In 1860 he went to Paris to study architecture at Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he stayed until the end of the Civil War in 1865. His first work as an architect was a Church of the Unity in Springfield, Massachusetts in Gothic Revival architectural style (pic. 6). But that was not his true style. Richardson same like Brooks preferred Romanesque, architectural style “characterized by round arches, masonry barrel vaults, thick walls, bold massing and clearly articulated parts” (Curran 62, 63).
The Romanesque architectural style lasted in Europe from the 9th century until the beginning of …show more content…

It was a period of time when many monasteries and pilgrimage churches were built. Even so there is no typical Romanesque church we still can find some common characteristics defining this style. Next to the round arches, barrel vaults, thick walls, bold massing and clearly articulated parts already mention early we must also mention the strict symmetry, regularity and the so called square schematism where the dimension of the church are calculated as multiples of the standard unit, square (Kostof 281). And some of these churches served as an inspiration to Richardson in the process of developing the final design for Trinity Church in Boston. We do know that the pilgrimage church Saint-Gilles-du-Gard in southern France (pic. 1) was Richardson inspiration for the portal arrangement (Stebbins 286). The west portal of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard was constructed in the 12th century and is considered to be most beautiful of all the great Romanesque portals and stunning example of the Provencal Romanesque in southern France. The stone carvings on this portal depict Roman and Biblical motives and show the story of Christ (Gangewere). After visiting St. Trophime, also pilgrimage church, in 1882 he planned to design …show more content…

Richardson found his inspiration. Now we can look at the time period in which the church was design and built. The west of the USA was mainly farmed. Army was used to keep Indians in reservations and many conflicts did break up from which the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 is probably the most familiar. The situation in the east was quite different. In the second half of the 19th century the industrial revolution which started in Europe reached the USA, but did not spread beyond New York and some other northern cities. Indeed, many industries are developing in this part of the country where newly arrived immigrants provided cheap labor. It is a time in which inventions like Thomas Edison’s electric lightbulb in 1879 helped change the world (Daniels, Hyslop 273-274). New development is reached even in architecture. The year 1885 saw the construction of the first skyscraper, even so it was only 10 stories, but with steel frame and brick walls (First

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