The Architect Who Unified America | Martin Filler
Rare are the architects whose works permanently alter our perceptions of how structures should look and function. Rarer still are the master builders who both change the way we see things and also attract a school of followers who carry their ideas well into the future. Such transformative figures are easy enough to identify in twentieth-century architecture—Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe immediately come to mind. Although it is harder to find their equivalents among the scrum of nineteenth-century architects before historical eclecticism gave way to the full emergence of modernism, one conspicuous exception is H.H. Richardson, whom Lewis Mumford with good reason called “the first architect of distinction in America who was ready to face the totality of modern life.” During Richardson’s all too brief but highly fruitful two-decade career, he designed many houses and churches, the bread and butter of architects in his day. But he also had a clearer idea than any of his coprofessional contemporaries of where the country was headed after the Civil War, and he readily embraced …
