Trinity Church, Boston

Trinity Church stands on Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay like a single great mass of warm stone: a squat cross of rough-faced Dedham granite with contrasting coloured stonework, gathered under a broad central tower about 64 metres high. It is the building that made Henry Hobson Richardson's name and gave American architecture a style of its own. The heavy round arches, deep-set openings, polychrome masonry and dominant tower that came to be called Richardsonian Romanesque appeared here first, and within a few years courthouses, libraries and railway stations across the country were echoing them. In 1885 a poll of American architects ranked Trinity as the most important building in the United States, and it has kept its place among the American Institute of Architects' most significant buildings ever since.

The parish is far older than the church. It was founded in 1733, and its earlier home on Summer Street was lost in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Under its rector Phillips Brooks, a celebrated preacher of the day, the congregation moved to the newly filled Back Bay, and Richardson's church and parish house rose between 1872 and 1877. Because the district was reclaimed mud flat, the building rests on roughly 4,500 timber piles driven deep through fill, silt and clay; they survive only as long as groundwater keeps them wet. The plan is a modified Greek cross, the main tower was drawn in Richardson's office by the young Stanford White after the Romanesque tower of the Old Cathedral of Salamanca, and the west portal may owe something to Saint-Trophime in Arles. A statue of Brooks stands on the outside of the church.

Inside, colour is everything. Richardson and Brooks wanted a richly painted interior and turned to John La Farge, who had never undertaken anything on this scale; the murals, covering about 2,000 square metres of wall and vault, were carried out entirely by American artists and established La Farge's reputation. Clear glass filled the windows at the consecration, but major stained glass followed: four windows by Edward Burne-Jones made in William Morris's workshop, and four by La Farge himself, whose layered opalescent glass changed the craft of the American window. The church also holds sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French. Since the 1970s the Romanesque tower has been reflected in the glass wall of the John Hancock Tower beside it, one of the city's best-known juxtapositions of old and new.

Getting there

Trinity Church is on Copley Square in the Back Bay neighbourhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) is about 6 km away in a straight line, across the inner harbour. Copley station on the MBTA Green Line is beside the square, and Back Bay station, served by the Orange Line, commuter rail and Amtrak, is a short walk to the south.