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Will the Real H.H. Richardson Please Rise?
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12044 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
1,980 Words |
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John Braeman
John Braeman is professor of history at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln. |
H.H. RICHARDSON
Architectural Forms for an American Society
James F. O'Gorman
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
171 pp., $24.95
The relationship between an artist and his time is complex. Whatever the degree of his individual genius, he is still a product of a given cultural environment. And he must appeal in some fashion to the values and tastes of his contemporaries to gain acceptance.
The need for such acceptance is especially pressing for the architect. His lifeblood is commissions involving substantial dollars-and-cents investments. [Much of the contemporary theoretical discussion of architectural history has a strongly neo-Marxist tone.] Perhaps most influential has been the thesis advanced by the French urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his La production de l'espace (1976). Lefebvre suggests that every economic mode of production involves a distinctive type of urban space. Architectural historian Dolores Hayden has accordingly argued in the recent symposium American Architecture: Innovation and Tradition (Rizzoli, 1986) that the "history of American building must go beyond symbolic attractiveness and seek the underlying social and economic forces that have shaped American space."
At the same time, transitory success is no guarantee of a lasting reputation. The world is filled with buildings once considered the pride of their day that strike a later generation as blights upon landscape. Henry Hobson Richardson belongs to the select few among architects who have succeeded in achieving popular acclaim in their own day along with a posthumous recognition as one of the giants in the field. That reputation is all the more extraordinary because of the briefness of his active career: the two decades from his return to the United States from Paris in October 1865, to his death in April 1886 at the age of forty-seven.
The period of Richardson's significant work was shorter still, beginning with his wining the competition for the design of Boston's Trinity Church in 1872. Nothing more graphically testifies to the preeminence he achieved during those years than a poll of architects conducted by the American Architect and Building News the year before his death. The poll asked what they thought were the best buildings in the United States. Richardson was responsible for five of the top ten. Even more striking has been his
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