Product Description

Elegantly written and filled with lush, full-color photos, this is the first in-depth portrait of H.H. Richardson, the greatest American architect of the 19th century and a man whose magnetic, colorful personality was equal to his genius. 150 photos, 100 in full color.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #504906 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
An atmospheric text resonates more profoundly thanks to some 150 photographs capturing the quiet grandeur of the buildings designed by Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-86). Born in Louisiana, Richardson made his career in the North, aided by his personal charm and the social connections he made while a Harvard undergraduate. He invented American architecture with masterpieces of vigorous historicism such as Boston's Trinity Church; even the modernists who followed were influenced by Richardson's veneration of architecture as important public art. Architecture historian James F. O'Gorman evaluates his subject's work and life appreciatively but with discernment.

From Library Journal
O'Gorman is the foremost authority on Richardson, having authored H.H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (Univ. of Chicago, 1987) and half a dozen books on related topics. Together with Jeffrey Earl Ochsner's H.H. Richardson: Complete Architectural Works (1984), this thoughtful and learned biography completes our knowledge of the life and achievements of America's greatest 19th-century architect. Richardson emerges in this study as a paradox: a Southerner who worked in the North, a sensitive artist who worked for industrial barons, and a fashioner of dignified, weighty homes who lived in an ill-proportioned, rented "Jamaican Planter's" house in suburban Brookline. Robinson's photographs are simply among the best; never before has Richardson's architecture been seen to greater effect. For larger general public and academic collections and all American architecture collections.?Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
O'Gorman's conversational prose is perfectly complemented by the eloquent images of the architectural photographer Cervin Robinson, whose definitive compositions, unimprovably lighted and instructively detailed, emphasize Richardson's dynamic interplay of massive masonry and delicate ornament.... prodigious vitality comes across on every page of this book. -- The New York Times Book Review, Martin Filler