Henry Hobson Richardson practised at a period when the terms of architecture itself were under argument.
The record lists Henry Hobson Richardson as American architect (1838–1886).
Henry Hobson Richardson was born in 1838. His recorded nationality is United States.
Industrialisation gave architecture iron, glass and the lift, and with them the problems of the railway station, the factory and the tall city block.
Buildings outlast their architects and usually their purposes, which is what makes the discipline unforgiving.
That the work was built in United States shaped it: climate, materials, planning law and who holds the budget all decide what can actually be built.
Henry Hobson Richardson died in 1886, aged 48. The buildings remain, still in use by people who never knew the name - which is the particular afterlife architecture offers.
