The J. J. Glessner House Chicago: Henry Hobson Richardson Book

Henry Hobson Richardson designed the Glessner House (1885-87) in Chicago for an industrialist and his family. The house was built in an elite residential neighborhood on the south side of the city near the Loop, and Richardson took advantage of the lot's location on the south-western corner of Prairie Avenue and Eighteenth Street to give the building a special character. He seized this opportunity to provide two impressive facades as well as an inner court yard unseen from either street. Even after a century of change in its urban surroundings the Glessner House, with its two exterior walls of rough cut pink-gray granite, conveys a powerful presence.

The Glessner House is significant because it was created toward the end of the life and the career of Richardson who was the most important American architect of the nineteenth century. It is one of the mature works of this well-trained and highly creative architect, and has been called "his best residence in Chicago, probably his best anywhere". In common with other architects of the 1870's and 80's Richardson rethought the floor plan of the American house. However, his plans were especially adept, even revolutionary, in combining functional and aesthetic aspects. In his working fashion Richardson conceived the house as a whole, planned it from the inside out, and carefully placed rooms and their connections in the plan. He unified the facade, exterior massing, and decorative elements, the whole expressing the building's purpose.

The recent Hedrich-Blessing colour photographs, primarily by Robert Shimer, display the warm, rich interior surfaces and the reserved granite facades of the house to their fullest advantage. Added to thisbook is a portfolio of historic black and white photographs that record Richardson's masterwork while the Glessner family was in residence.

Elaine M. Holzschuh Harrington has been the Curator of the Glessner House and the Curator of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio (Opus 23: Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park). She has written and lectured extensively about both. Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago's oldest and foremost architectural photography firm, was founded in 1929. From its beginning, the firm has been noted for portraying the most dramatic rendition of a building within the bounds of high architectural accuracy.