A little over a decade ago, in the years framing the centennial of Mies van der Rohe’s birth, three books were published which so advanced the state of scholarship on Mies that, all of a sudden, comparative understanding of Wright and Le Corbusier —if not of twentieth-century modernism itself—seemed glaringly inadequate. Franz Schulze’s biography furnished a rigorous chronological framework and deep insight into the man; Fritz Neumeyer’s investigation constituted, and remains, the richest intellectual biography of any modern architect; and Wolf Tegethoff’s typological study carefully examined Mies’s country houses. A nearly parallel publishing event has just occurred that has similarly transformed our understanding of the work of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886), a man Lewis Mumford considered the greatest architectural mind since Wren. In the years since the Mies centennial, architectural publishing has evolved along an interesting path, and in many ways the new crop of Richardson titles offers more than just state-of-the-art research.

If his name is known at all by the public at large, it is probably in its adjectival form —Richardsonian. The Richardsonian Romanesque, typified by Boston’s rough and ruddy Trinity Church (1872–77), was a cultural achievement of such scope and magnitude that Mumford employed the sobriquet “Brown Decades” to characterize the epoch. The style is easily recognized by its aggressive massing and robustly rusticated medievalizing forms that are so powerful as to appear to be glacial deposits. He is regarded as our first genuinely “American” architect, an artist of the first rank who, through a skillful