By any standard, Henry Hobson Richardson was one of this country's greatest
architects. The building he considered his masterpiece, his last completed
design, was the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail in Pittsburgh. Philip
Johnson called it the best building in America. In every way it is useful
as well as ornamental. The great tower, for example, meant to be the tallest
building in Pittsburgh (but dwarfed a few years later when skyscrapers
were invented), is also the intake for the ventilation system. The building
itself serves as Richardson's best epitaph. "He left to his country many
monuments of art, foremost among them this temple of justice": those words
are carved in stone on the third floor.
Though his enormous Romanesque structures like the Courthouse are what
people remember him for, Richardson displayed perhaps even more originalty
in his one other Pittsburgh building, the modest but perfect Emmanuel Episcopal
Church in Allegheny West. If the courthouse is a great and complex symphony,
Emmanuel Episcopal is one perfect bagatelle. Locals call it "the bake oven,"
and indeed its unusual shape is hard to describe in normal architectural
terms. The bowed walls, incidentally, were not part of the plan; the weight
of the massive roof pushed them outwards, and since they have been stable
that way for a hundred years, the congregation has never spent the money
to put them straight.
