Kenneth Breish's eagerly-awaited study of H. H. Richardson's libraries provides a broad analysis of the emergence of a important and distinctly American building type—the suburban mall or small-town public library—and deep reading of the contests between the architect, the patrons and professional librarians in the design of five Richardson buildings. The book should be required reading for both architectural historians and students of American cultural history.
Keith N. Morgan, Professor of Art History, Boston University
Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in Amerrica is architectural history at its best. shedding new light on some of the best known buildings on the history of American architecture. Kenneth Breisch has succeeded in reconnecting Richardson's libraries with the complex cultural milieu that helped shape them. He is particularlyy skilled at articulating the attitudes of New England cultural elite that commissioned these buildings, and at elucidatign the importance of those attitudes in the library design debate that pitted librarians againts architects in the last quater of the 19th century. His close reading of the buildings themselves is an especially welcomed demonstration of the powerfuk tool that formal analysis offers to a social hisotry of architecture.
Abigail A. Van Slyck, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Arizona
This study skillfully integrates analysis of programmatic agenda, cultural currents, and concerns of artistics expression to provide fresh, insightful perspectives on an important, but little studied, building type as well as one of the nation's most distinguished architects.
Richard Longstreth, Professor of American Civilizations, George Washington University
Richardon's role is giving form to the emergent building types of the late nineteenth century such as the library has been widely recognized, but Kenneth Breich's Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America is the first in-depth exploration focused exclusively Richardson's five public library commisons. By focussing only on this small group of buildings Breisch is able to address the roles played by donors, clients, and architects, and to demonstrate how each building was created within a web of intersecting goals, influences, ambitions and ideas. Breisch sets the stage by tracing the history of the American library prior to Richardson, and closes with a discussion of the critiques these buildings recieved from newly professionalized librarians. The work is exeplary, as Breisch places these libraries not only within the architectural evolution of Richardson's career, but also in their broad functional, social and cultural contexts.
Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, FAIA,Chair, Department of Architecture, University of Washington
Professor Breisch illuminates the innovative role of H. H. Richardson at a critical moment in the history of library design, in the most skillfully written and definitive study of the subject so far. By integrating a wealth of information from nineteenth-century architectural history with cultural and social imperatives for the first time, this book should become a standard reference.
Margaret Henderson Floyd, Professor of Architectural History and American Art, Tufts University
One of the most substantive new interpretations of Richardson's work to appear in years.
American Studies International
Kenneth Breisch has filled in an important missing chapter in the evolution of H. H. Richardson's architectural work. More than an architectural history, he has successfully placed the development of Richardson's libraries into a wider context, including detailed analyses of client patronage, the development of the American library system, and the complex cultural milieu of the late 19th century. It is a very convincing work of architectural and cultural history.
Thomas C. Hubka, Professor of Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
The suburban libraries of H. H. Richardson, like the country banks of Louis Sullivan, are small gems in the crown of American architecture. They represent the mid-nineteenth-century flowering of popular literacy and middle-class philanthropy. In this richly-textured monograph Kenneth Breisch details the evolution of this building type in Richardson's work and those of his contemporaries. This is a sophisticated addition to the history of architecture.
James F. O'Gorman, Grace Slack McNeil Professor of the History of American Art Wellesley College
