Henry Hobson Richardson was an influential architect active in the late 1800s and based in Boston. I learned about him by reading Architects of an American Landscape by Hugh Howard which I originally picked up because I thought it was going to mostly be about Frederick Law Olmstead but turned out to be more of a study of Richardson’s work. The man was a character for sure. He was a big man, physically, emotionally, and professionally. I articular appreciated this excerpt from another book, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, and think that there is something to aspire to there.

Another fundamental quality in Richardson’s work is breadth of treatment. It is this which gives his results an air of “bigness” – not the actual size in which many of them chances to be great. Artistically speaking, his smallest structures are as big as his largest, and they are so because they are largely treated. Whatever his faults he never worked in a small, hesitating, feeble way. Cleverness in aim and strength in rendering were the gods of his idolatry in art. If combined with refinement, so much the better; if not, they were still to be preferred to refinement without them.. We are sure that he excused the faults of a Rubens on canvas, of a Michael Angelo in architecture, but never those of a painter who had microscopically elaborated a weak conception, of an architect who had delicately adorned a fabric that was not in the true sense a building.