 Austin Hall, Harvard University Law School`s oldest dedicated structure, was designed by architect H.H. Richardson and completed in 1884, then remodeled in 1964. It stands out as one of the best examples of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. Single-story wings flank a heavy, two-story central mass, with the reading room extending rearwards to form an overall T shape. A central entryway framed with Romanesque triple arch is set deep within the building's flat front facade, with an asymmetric stairway tower protruding forwards to its right. The building is faced with Longmeadow sandstone in striking polychrome patterns, the light stones forming checkerboards within dark, reddish walls. The arches are of pale Ohio sandstone, as is the thick cornice band incised with a lengthy and sententious motto.

Harvard Law School

Austin Hall

 Sever Hall was built with 100,000 bricks and has elaborate brick carvings. The archway was built with unique acoustic properties. If you face the archway and whisper into it, it can be clearly heard on the other side of the archway. It now houses the film program and the Visual and Environmental Studies programs at Harvard. 

Sever Hall

 Designed in 1884 and completed in 1888, the Courthouse and the Jail behind it on Ross Street are recognized internationally as among the most significant buildings designed by H.H. Richardson, America's leading architect at the end of the 19th Century. A self-guided walking tour brochure is available weekdays from the information office located in the courtyard off Forbes Avenue. The guide is recommended to fully experience the building, including courtroom 321 which has been restored to its original design. 

Allegheny County Courthouse

 Trinity Church, a national historic landmark, was awarded to iconic American architect Henry Hobson Richardson in a design competition in 1872. With its monumental stone porches, arches and buttresses building up to a massive central tower, capped with pinnacles and turrets and presenting a rich complex of ever-shifting shapes and unexpected sequences of pattern in color and texture, Trinity Church embodies a fuller and more mature realization of the visual and intellectual implications present in earlier 19th-century High Victorian picturesque architectural style. In his design, Richardson freely rendered and personalized his impressions of several great 11th-century French Romanesque churches and the main tower of a Spanish cathedral. The interior is graced with the murals by prominent American artist John La Farge. Equally formidable was Richardson's innovative engineering scheme that required driving 4,500 wooden piles into the site's landfill to support the weight of the church. Trinity Church is the only church and the only Boston building that has the honor of being named one of "Ten Most Significant buildings in the United States" by the American Institute of Architects. 

Copley Square

Trinity Church, Boston

 Historian and author Douglass Shand-Tucci talks about building of Trinity Church in Boston. 

 The Emerald Necklace Conservancy, dedicated to protecting, restoring, and promoting the Olmsted designed Park System, is newly housed in a unique Park resource. Only 1,400 sf, this project transformed H.H. Richardson`s Stony Brook Gatehouse into a new headquarters for the Conservancy and a new resource for the community. The design provides areas for information and interpretive displays, and a workplace and gathering space for meetings, education, and volunteer activities. &ldquo;This project was a balance between time, budget, program and design and has resulted in an open and balanced space that is not only functional but also very flexible.&rdquo; - James Smith AIA, LEED AP, Architect 

Emerald Necklace Conservancy

ABOUT THE BUILDING Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the Hayden Building is part of a larger genealogy in the design of buildings leading up to the first skyscrapers. H.H. Richardson`s grand simple gesture of massive stone and grouped windows in sequence gave large buildings a sense of monumentality and nobility. Richardson showed architects how to express the scale of increasingly larger buildings without overusing ornament. The Hayden Building is one the last remaining and earliest built example of this significant change in the design of large buildings. -CUBE design + research, LLC ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS It probably boasts the most muscle-bound architecture of any building of its tiny size in Boston. It's the Hayden Building, battered but still standing at the corner of Washington and LaGrange in the Combat Zone. The Hayden replaced a drugstore that exploded on this site in 1875, killing five and leaving the debris we see in the old photo. The greatest of Boston architects, Henry Hobson Richardson (his Trinity Church, in Copley Square, was under construction at the time) designed the building as four stories of office space above a ground-floor shop. He made its burly walls of rough brownstone, and its massive arches and lintels out of equally rough granite. Richardson's client was the estate of his wife's parents, and historians think that he may have employed the Hayden as an experimental prototype for a more important commission) the famous Marshall Field Wholesale Store, in Chicago (now demolished). In recent decades, the Hayden changed along with its neighborhood, housing a peep show on the ground floor and a gay bathhouse above, until being gutted by a fire in 1985. It is now jointly owned by Chinatown businessman David Wong and Historic Boston Inc., a private preservation group. They're about to scrub a century of soot from the masonry, which, in the case of the brownstone, is a rare salmon-colored variety. T'he Hayden is an official Boston landmark and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. -Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - The Hayden Building",Boston Globe, 7 August 1994

The Hayden Building

Hayden Building

 As Rector of Trinity Church, Phillips Brooks oversaw the construction of one of Boston's greatest architectural landmarks. Trinity Church was founded in 1733, but a fire in 1872 destroyed the original building, allowing Brooks to commission this iconic Romanesque-style structure. In this work, the sculptors depict him as a man of great moral and physical stature, and as an impassioned speaker. The cloaked figure of Christ stands behind Brooks and places a hand on his left shoulder, lending him additional authority. Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his assistant Frances Grimes designed the sculpture while the notable architects Stanford White and Charles McKim designed the domed niche. Such collaboration between artists and architects is common in the realm of public art, where works often blur the boundaries between art, architecture, and landscape design. Courtesy of Boston Art Commission. 

Phillips Brooks

 Richardson was a prominent American architect in the 19th century, and the first American architect whose architectural style influenced European design. His style, Richardsonian Romanesque, has impacted the cities of Boston, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Albany, and Chicago. Richardson was a Harvard graduate, and his archives reside at Harvard's Houghton Library. Following his death, his practice was carried on by George Shepley, Charles Rutan, and Charles Coolidge. The firm has been known as Shepley Rutan and Coolidge (1886-1915); Coolidge and Shattuck (1915-1924); Coolidge Shepley Bulfinch and Abbott (1924-1952) before taking its present name of Shepley Bulfinch Richardson &amp; Abbott in 1952. 

Henry Hobson Richardson

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