Once, decades ago, when I was in my 20s, I helped a historian named Charles McLaughlin with an article he was preparing about the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. McLaughlin had just begun editing Olmsted’s papers, and together we sifted through copies of letters and drawings, stacked precariously on a long table. Mixed among the plans for Central Park (Manhattan) and the Back Bay Fens (Boston) were some other drawings—of buildings, not landscapes. I picked up a few of the oversize sheets. “What are these?,” I asked.
What followed was a gentle, patient introduction to Henry Hobson Richardson, Olmsted’s intimate friend and occasional collaborator—the man who designed Boston’s landmark Trinity Church and (predominantly) New York’s State Capitol, created a national template for what a public library could be, and more or less invented the rambling Shingle Style house.
