12d Conversation on Copley Square: Conceptions

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Trinity Church, Boston Public Library and the Old South Church. Richardsonian Romanesque, Beaux-Artes Classicism and Ruskin's Venetian Gothic. Digital collage by author.

The 1870s laid the groundwork for today's Copley Square. In the decade prior, Bostonians saw fit to fill in a stagnant pond previously cut off from the Charles River: Back Bay. Cultural and religious institutions saw the new land as an opportunity to improve their architectural footprint, and homed in on our intersection of interest. The construction of the Museum of Fine Arts (where the Fairmont Copley Hotel stands today) offered the name Art Square, which stuck until the museum relocated in 1909. Those earliest, pre-Boston-Public-Library days come stained in a rich Victorian fascination with everything Gothic. The third Old South Church, reconsecrated at the northwest corner of the Square, yearns for Ruskin's impossible nostalgia. The Museum of Fine Arts, may it rest in peace, clads itself in superficially Gothic terra-cotta.¹ Trinity Church's lineage is trickier to trace. Its architect, H. H. Richardson, aspires to a transcendentalist individualism in his architecture. He breaks from delineated legacies to manifest his own fraught destiny. Both churches remain on today's Copley Square, but many visitors do not even remember seeing the Old South Church cater-corner as it pines for a bygone time. Trinity's central location and exquisite presentation hold authority.

¹ Margaret Henderson Floyd dissects the original Museum of Fine Arts building, its lineage and its legacy in "A Terra-Cotta Cornerstone for Copley Square: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1870- 1876, by Sturgis and Brigham," published in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32 (May 1973), 83–103.

H. H. Richardson received an early Beaux-Artes education for an American architect; he was the second émigré to attend the academy. Though the school's educated sensibilities stuck, their dogmatic styles did not. Trinity Church presents a nascent example of Richardson's radical adoption of an eclectic Romanesque. Despite the Romans' preference for Latin, Richardson employs a Greek-cruciform floor plan where the nave, transepts and chancel find an unusually equal spatial balance. The lantern, populated with elaborate paintings, patterns, scripts and symbols on a bright red backdrop, adds another arm in the third dimension. Outside, the stubby spire upsets any preordained proportional order. The westwerk rises in ornamented, variegated masonry. Off the rear corner, an asymmetrical abbey protrudes against Huntington's diagonal. An arcade wraps across and up the front of this appendage; its columns alternate between facsimiles of slender Corinthian and sturdy Doric as they unorthodoxly step and round the corner. The architectural vocabulary borrows from no respectable dialect or discernable language, yet Richardson forms a coherent syntax understood throughout Trinity's anomaly.

The unprecedented choreography Trinity Church presents in its architectural and ornamental elements forges a Richardsonian identity. His reconstruction of styles into a new variety of Romanesque exploits qualities latent in medieval, revival and colonial approaches. Rather than remake the established ecclesiatic genre, Richardson finds an alternate to the established methods within their means. At first glance, Trinity Church is at once exactly a church and unlike any church ever built — even today it stands out against an expanded purview of acceptable aesthetics. Richardson and his disciples would go on to proliferate his aesthetic across the (mainly northeastern) United States. Richardsonian Romanesque would grow into a bona fide architectural style. Despite appearing anomalous at its opening, Trinity Church's impact on and emphasis of what it means to be 'American' architecture has reshaped the context in which visitors read the building today. Its days of idiosyncratic exclusion are over; everything around it comes from it.

Juxtaposed across Copley Square sits the Boston Public Library. Their initial rivalry — unabashed vs ordered, medieval vs classical, different vs precedented — falls apart upon closer inspection. As discussed, both reconceive their styles to deliver novel architectures: Richardson by choice and McKim by necessity. Both architects implement aptitudes acquired at École des Beaux Arts, even if only the students of McKim's era would import the school's neoclassical forms back to the States. Their design relationship extends further, however, as McKim actually worked under Richardson, which perhaps explains some of the more liberal tactics undertaken in the library (as short as they fall when compared to Richardson's exploratory formalism). Both architects have given structures that make the Square proud, but the smaller one, the misshapen church tucked behind the trees and reflected now by a collapsing sky, continues to have the loudest voice.

This entry continues in Summations.