Oakes Ames Memorial Hall is one of the most beautiful and distinctive special events and meetings venues in Metropolitan Boston.
Designed by the renowned Gilded Age architect, Henry Hobson Richardson – who, along with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright constitute the “Trinity of American Architecture” – the building sits on property designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the “Father of American Landscape Architecture”.
Of course, North Easton Village – located within the incorporated town of Easton – is a trove of architectural genius rendered and created by luminaries, including Richardson, Olmsted, Stanford White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John La Farge … and others.
With five buildings designed by H.H. Richardson – Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, Ames Free Library, Old Colony Railroad Station, Ames Gate Lodge, and the F.L. Ames Gardener’s Cottage – Easton holds almost 10 percent of all Richardson buildings in the world.
Architecture and design students and enthusiasts from around the globe travel to North Easton to study, admire, photograph, and enjoy.
And, for sure, there is something about an H.H. Richardson building that makes it “go to” and prized as a place to hold the most special wedding receptions, reunions, birthday parties, bar and bat mitzvah parties, anniversaries, award dinners, fundraisers … and any event that has to be wonderful and wholly memorable.
Oakes Ames Memorial Hall is also a desired location for corporate meetings and “offsite” confabs and strategy sessions.
Now, okay, obviously Oakes Ames Memorial Hall (OAMH) is grand and awe-inspiring – it commands attention.
But what is the form and style of architecture embodied and manifest in OAMH?
Well – fittingly enough – the form, the style, is called … wait … yep … Richardsonian Romanesque.
“This very free revival style incorporates 11th and 13th century southern French, Spanish, and Italian Romanesque characteristics,” as explained in the Wikipedia entry on Richardson Romanesque. “It emphasizes clear, strong picturesque massing, round-headed ‘Romanesque’ arches, often springing from clusters of short squat columns, recessed entrances, richly varied rustication, blank stretches of walling contrasting with bands of windows, and cylindrical towers with conical caps embedded in the walling.”
H.H. Richardson and his style influenced many distinguished architects, including Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Frank Alden, George Shepley, Charles Coolidge, and Herbert Burdett … among others.
Richardson also influences a “school” of architecture – that would be the Chicago School.
Henry Hobson Richardson and his genius is expressed in some of the most magnificent structures in the U.S.
Please click here to be taken to an Old House Online page devoted to Richardsonian Romanesque.