A little over a decade ago, in the years framing the centennial of Mies van der Rohe’s birth, three books were published which so advanced the state of scholarship on Mies that, all of a sudden, comparative understanding of Wright and Le Corbusier —if not of twentieth-century modernism itself—seemed glaringly inadequate. Franz Schulze’s biography furnished a rigorous chronological framework and deep insight into the man; Fritz Neumeyer’s investigation constituted, and remains, the richest intellectual biography of any modern architect; and Wolf Tegethoff’s typological study carefully examined Mies’s country houses. A nearly parallel publishing event has just occurred that has similarly transformed our understanding of the work of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886), a man Lewis Mumford considered the greatest architectural mind since Wren. In the years since the Mies centennial, architectural publishing has evolved along an interesting path, and in many ways the new crop of Richardson titles offers more than just state-of-the-art research.

If his name is known at all by the public at large, it is probably in its adjectival form —Richardsonian. The Richardsonian Romanesque, typified by Boston’s rough and ruddy Trinity Church (1872–77), was a cultural achievement of such scope and magnitude that Mumford employed the sobriquet “Brown Decades” to characterize the epoch. The style is easily recognized by its aggressive massing and robustly rusticated medievalizing forms that are so powerful as to appear to be glacial deposits. He is regarded as our first genuinely “American” architect, an artist of the first rank who, through a skillful translation and transformation of traditional European stylistic vocabularies into indigenous materials, established an unmistakably American architecture.

The most enduring explanation of Richardson’s achievement, based in many respects on Marianne Van Rensselaer’s 1888 biography, was composed by Henry-Russell Hitchcock in the mid Thirties. It is a Romantic story about a Romantic artist-hero of prodigious appetites and accomplishments, a story that served to acclimate the American sensibility to what Hitchcock regarded as its natural extension: modernism. Richardson attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the first important American after William Morris Hunt to set his sights so high, yet who by dint of Herculean willpower was able to slough off the thick dead skin of academicism (unlike Hunt) and develop his personal style into a commercial and critical success. This whole Romantic scenario is fun to read and encourages the coining of ever more strident superlatives to describe both the man and his buildings. The new generation of Richardson scholarship, typified in each of these fine studies, has the effect of retaining all of the sheer delight in Richardson’s resplendent talent while significantly refining the way in which we understand not only the emergence of Richardson’s mature style and the creation of a unique organizational modus operandi in his atelier, but also the way his work was originally received and what it offered to other talented designers drawn into his orbit such as Stanford White, Charles Follen McKim, and Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow. In this way, the authors considered here have essentially thrown open the possibility of reconsidering the full complexity and fascinating development of American architecture and urban planning in the first half of the twentieth century without the historicist distortions of the early modernist apologists like Hitchcock and Mumford.

Although some major Richardson works have been long lost to the wrecker’s ball, there is still a sufficient number of important works to receive due attention by skilled contemporary photographers, and two of the works reviewed here present what amount to specially commissioned photo essays that function as almost parallel texts to the literary efforts that accompany them. Indeed, one of the more interesting developments in architectural publishing of late has been the attempted fusion of two previously irreconcilable types: the lavish coffee-table book and the scholarly tome. In fact, these titles offer equal billing to author and photographer. I am delighted to report that both the O’Gorman-Robinson and the Floyd-Rocheleau titles are exceedingly fine examples of this type of hybrid book for different, yet mutually reinforcing, reasons. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect is the wholly different approach toward architectural photography taken by Paul Rocheleau and Cervin Robinson.

Robinson’s work, perhaps the most celebrated of any living architectural photographer, has graced the pages of numerous monographs and magazine articles, and has been the subject of several solo exhibitions; he also co-authored a path-breaking volume on the history of architectural photography. Beyond the requisite and ineffable luck necessary for all nonstudio work, Robinson brings an artistic personality and point of view almost as vivid and ebullient as Richardson’s. One might say that at their best, Robinson’s photographs convey more than the optical, that he pours all sorts of sensory data into his viewers’ eyes by capturing elusive haptic information on texture, vague memory images of temperature, and even aural traces of faint echoes, footfalls, and whispers. So strong is his vision that certain architectural images are engraved into one’s consciousness more forcefully in two dimensions than in three; I am referring specifically to the utterly grainless detail of the fireplace and clock at Richardson’s New York State Court of Appeals on page 121. Such an image inevitably alters the way one sees Richardson. Robinson truly excels at finding the telling angle, seizing the eloquent detail, turning our attention to an artful composition within the composition. For some reason, however, Robinson’s overall views are neither as convincing nor as informative as his close-ups. It may be that none is given the proper support in layout, or perhaps that large details are more inherently exciting due to the drama of inventive cropping.

Paul Rocheleau, an experienced and versatile photographer whose work has centered on a number of uniquely American architectural and cultural topics, has gone to great lengths to present a more intentionally objective visual assessment of Richardson’s work. It is as if his ego is drained from the viewfinder and Richardson’s presence becomes more fully felt. Rocheleau’s evenhandedness results in a more balanced documentary approach to the subject, and even when he allows himself an oblique vista or a juicy detail, one senses that it is indeed well within the spectator’s ordinary physical experience of the building.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects offered by this photographic comparison is the contrasting images presented of Richardson’s own touch. Robinson seems to “see” more of the Romantic protoexpressionist in Richardson and accordingly celebrates the rough-cut crusty bosses of Richardson’s wickedly dramatic rustication. This intensely personal approach fits hand in glove with O’Gorman’s sensitive and exquisitely turned biography. Rocheleau, by contrast, seems to take the long view, so to speak. In his work, we see Richardson as a man whose genius for geometry sings forth in every stringcourse and mortar bed, because each stratum of dressed stone is presented as the inevitable product of a singularly powerful presiding intellect. In its way, this perspective is also mirrored in Floyd’s patient and meticulous verbal analysis.

Both books are also complementary in matters of content and style. James F. O’Gorman, the Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art at Wellesley College, is a dominant presence in the history of American architecture. His contributions to the improved understanding of Richardson over the years have been legion, and, in the leisurely pace at which he plies his narrative, O’Gorman gracefully displays his truly remarkable command of his subject matter’s potential nuances. Organizationally, the book is ingenious; as an expository writer O’Gorman has few peers. One can only think of the literary talent of the late William H. Jordy, who pithily characterized the “massive certainty and assertiveness” of Richardson and his work. O’Gorman’s manifest ease as a raconteur and buoyant enthusiasm make Living Architecture a joy to read.

The late Margaret Henderson Floyd, formerly professor of art and art history at Tufts University, was a noted authority on New England architecture, with a special emphasis on her adopted town of Boston. Her recent Architecture after Richardson (1994) represents a unique accomplishment in American architectural history, and no doubt served as a convenient footbridge to this project. One experiences few of O’Gorman’s verbal pyrotechnics in her account; in their stead one is treated to a sustained— indeed, a model—performance of tempered art historical reasoning and analysis from cover to cover. The signature elements of each phase of Richardson’s career are fully, almost lovingly, described and traced back to antecedents and forward into mature works. Richardson’s photographic collection offers an enormous mine for precise visual sourcing, and Floyd was clearly up to the job. Gradations from Norman to Welsh Romanesque are parsed and declined with skill and care, and the Manoir d’Ango is presented as a red thread weaving together Richardson’s Trinity Church, the Glessner House, and the Allegheny Jail. My reservations center on the ease with which she accepts certain findings concerning the influence of Japonisme, and on the somewhat weak organizational focus of the fourth chapter. It might have served her purpose better to break chapter 4 into separate sections treating distinct types. In addition, I would have also enjoyed a bibliography, but these are small objections. All in all, this is now the definitive source on Richardson. The text is clear, the abundant visual material is executed with the highest conceivable production values, and the result is a significantly improved understanding of Richardson as an architect and artist.

Most illuminating are those few places where each author takes a different position on the same material. The most salient area of contention appears to be Richardson’s absorption and digestion of his French academic experience and the impact of Viollet-le-Duc. Until the pioneering work of Richard Chafee in the mid and late 1970s, precious little was known about the specific pedagogical techniques at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. If Chafee’s important study of British and American pupils at the Ecole is ever published, it will no doubt fill in the gaping hole whose perimeter is suggested by Hunt’s and Richardson’s careers as élèves. For instance, O’Gorman sees the germ of Trinity Church in Julien Auguste Gaudet’s winning Prix de Rome project of 1864. Gaudet, a friend and companion of Richardson in the Atelier André who was eventually installed as the Ecole’s professor of theory and later penned the definitive theoretical statement of the Ecole’s method, offers a tantalizing prospect for study, since clearly Richardson was employing the French modular method. By contrast, Floyd’s illustration of the available English sources that Richardson probably saw is more compelling. Despite or perhaps because of his biographical emphasis, O’Gorman offers a picture of Richardson as a driven visionary, a goal-oriented artist. Floyd presents Richardson as a more equivocal and eclectic creator. The treatment of Viollet-le-Duc is also rather telling: O’Gorman presents Van Rensselaer’s hearsay account of Richardson ending up in a Paris jail with Théophile Gautier due to their support of Viollet’s incendiary lectures at the Ecole in 1863, but then immediately proceeds to minimize Richardson’s possible interest. Floyd sees a wider range of accomplishment from which Richardson could and did draw inspiration, primarily Viollet’s restoration of Carcassonne and his powerful if erratic primitivist inclinations. It is now clear that the time has come to reexamine the career, writings, and legacy of Viollet-le-Duc.

Breisch’s typological examination of Richardson’s libraries is necessarily more focused but, in comparison to the other authors’ achievements, it is something of a letdown. Furthermore, one does not pass the seventh paragraph before Breisch’s reflexively leftish politics are paraded about. Sadly, they never seem to retreat. Because Richardson’s libraries were privately commissioned as municipal gifts, and because philanthropy perennially constitutes an insuperable blindspot for the anticapitalist mentality, one never gets the feeling that the author really understood his task. He can’t seem to choke down the reality that the “overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon and male, conservative Republican” sponsors of these institutions could be capable of a decent civic act; instead, he presents the entire constellation of moral, aesthetic, and economic impulses as a purely political phenomenon. The libraries, he argues, were simply a form of “conservative social activism” intended as “a means of maintaining cultural hegemony over the working classes.” At any rate, although the politics are entirely as puerile and vulgar as I have suggested, the book has a good theme and an abundance of solid information. Despite glowing dust-jacket blurbs regarding the study’s so-called cultural value, it is when Breisch dabbles as a sociologist of style and stops conducting architectural history that his book collapses.