Brattle Square Church
You are here
First Baptist Church (Brattle Square Church)
1871, Henry Hobson Richardson. 110 Commonwealth Ave.
-
First Baptist Church (Brattle Square Church) (Peter Vanderwarker or Antonina Smith) -
(Damie Stillman) -
(Damie Stillman)
The former Brattle Square Church is the first building of H. H. Richardson's design to look recognizably Richardsonian, with round Romanesque arches at the entrance porch and in the tower. Although other architects had invoked the Gothic idiom in locally quarried Roxbury puddingstone, Richardson was the first to exploit the material's affinity for the Romanesque. Richardson created a T-shaped auditorium for the Brattle Square Congregational Church with a Sunday school and a campanile filling the re-entrant angles of the T. The soaring campanile, with its Bartholdi-modeled frieze depicting the sacraments, is particularly successful; the trumpeting angels at the corners earned the building its jocular sobriquet, “The Church of the Holy Bean-Blowers.” The costs of its construction having bankrupted the original congregation, the church has since 1884 been occupied by the First Baptist Society Church. They constructed balcony seating to correct terrible acoustics and filled the three rose windows with stained glass by L. C. Tiffany.
Writing Credits
If SAH Archipedia has been useful to you, please consider supporting it.
SAH Archipedia tells the story of the United States through its buildings, landscapes, and cities. This freely available resource empowers the public with authoritative knowledge that deepens their understanding and appreciation of the built environment. But the Society of Architectural Historians, which created SAH Archipedia with University of Virginia Press, needs your support to maintain the high-caliber research, writing, photography, cartography, editing, design, and programming that make SAH Archipedia a trusted online resource available to all who value the history of place, heritage tourism, and learning.