Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), American architect, helped set the standard for innovative design from which modern American architecture grew.

Henry Hobson Richardson was born in St. James parish, La., on Sept. 29, 1838. He studied engineering at Harvard College (1854-1859). During 1859 he traveled throughout the British Isles, and the following year he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, enrolling in the atelier of Jules Louis André. Later, lacking funds as a result of the blockade of New Orleans during the Civil War, Richardson went to work for Théodore Labrouste and probably worked on the Hospice d'Ivry near Paris, begun in 1862. Richardson was the second American to study at the École. Following the lead of his predecessor, Richard Morris Hunt, he avoided using the architectural idioms of the French Second Empire when he returned to practice in the United States in 1865.

Richardson's early designs were...