Trinity Church, Boston

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.