Trinity Church, Copley Square

There are buildings you visit, and there are buildings that change what a country's architecture looks like. Trinity Church, on the east side of Copley Square in Boston's Back Bay, is the second kind. Before it, American churches mostly copied Europe — Gothic spires borrowed from England, classical columns borrowed from Rome. After it, America had a style of its own: heavy, rough, richly colored stone; great round arches; a massive tower planted over the crossing; and an interior that glows with painted murals and stained glass. Architects named the style after its inventor. It is called Richardsonian Romanesque, and Trinity Church is where it was born.

The church is also, simply, the anchor of the finest public square in Boston. Stand in Copley Square on a clear afternoon and the whole architectural history of the city arranges itself around you: Richardson's rough stone church on one side, Charles Follen McKim's Renaissance Boston Public Library across the square, the mirrored glass of the John Hancock Tower rising behind the church and throwing its reflection back at it, and the Fairmont Copley Plaza and Old South Church completing the frame. Trinity is the oldest of the great buildings on the square and still the one your eye finds first. It was voted the most important building in the United States by American architects in 1885, it is the only church in the country on the American Institute of Architects' list of the Ten Most Significant Buildings in the United States, and it has been a National Historic Landmark since 1970. None of that is hype. Walk up to it, and then walk inside it, and the reasons are all in front of you.

Trinity's parish is older than the building by more than a century. The congregation was founded in 1733, and its earlier church on Summer Street, built in 1735, burned in the Great Boston Fire of 1872 — the fire that destroyed much of downtown Boston that November. The parish had already bought land in the Back Bay, then a brand-new neighborhood rising on filled land where a tidal bay had been, and the fire turned a planned move into an urgent one. In March 1872 the building committee invited six architectural firms to submit designs for the new church, and the winner was a young architect with Harvard connections and a growing reputation: Henry Hobson Richardson.

Richardson was only in his early thirties, and Trinity made his career. Construction ran from 1872 to 1877, and the complex — church and parish house together — was consecrated in 1877. The site was difficult in every way that mattered. It was a roughly triangular lot at the southeastern edge of what was then still an ill-formed square, and the ground beneath it was fill — gravel, silt, and clay laid over the old bay bottom. The building rests on some 4,500 wooden piles, each driven through about 30 feet of fill, and those piles survive only because the Back Bay water table keeps them constantly wet; exposed to air, they would rot. Even the tower had to be restrained: the spongy soil meant it could not rise as tall or as inventively as Richardson first imagined, and its lantern was patterned after the tower of the Old Cathedral of Salamanca in Spain — a design worked out in Richardson's office by the young Stanford White, who would go on to become one of America's most famous architects himself.

Trinity rewards a slow walk around the outside before you ever go in. The plan is a modified Greek Cross, with four arms of nearly equal length extending from the central tower, which stands 64 metres — about 211 feet — tall. The stone is rough Dedham granite, its gray bulk warmed by trim of red Longmeadow sandstone, and the whole composition plays with polychromy: bands and patterns of contrasting color that keep the massive walls from ever looking flat or dull. Heavy round arches carry the great porches; buttresses, turrets, pinnacles, and carved ornament pile up toward the tower; and the clay roof adds another note of color against the stone.

The west porch, the grand entrance facing Copley Square, is a later addition worth knowing about, because it shows how faithfully Richardson's successors followed him. After Richardson's early death in 1886, his successor firm, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, built the porch in 1894–1897, modeling it on the Romanesque church of St. Trophime at Arles in France — the same model Richardson himself had admired — and added the front side towers in the 1890s. The central portal itself may also have been modeled on St. Trophime. The result is a facade that looks of a piece, even though it was finished two decades after the church opened, by other hands. Look for the carved detail around the arches, the paired columns, and the low reliefs; this is a building that was designed to be read up close as well as admired from across the square.

On the north side of the church, beneath a baldachino designed by Charles F. McKim, stands the life-size statue of Phillips Brooks, the rector who drove the building project, sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Brooks was one of the best-known preachers of his time — he also wrote the words to the hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem" — and he served as Trinity's rector from 1869 to 1891. A bust of Brooks by Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial's seated Lincoln, stands in the baptistry inside. Two of America's greatest sculptors, on one parish church, tells you something about the company Trinity kept.

If the exterior is Richardson at his most monumental, the interior is his most radical idea, and it belongs to another man. Richardson and Brooks agreed that the inside had to be a "color church" — richly painted, floor to ceiling, in the manner of the great decorated churches of Europe, but executed entirely by American artists. They turned to the painter John La Farge, who had never undertaken a commission on anything like this scale and who asked only that his costs be covered. The result established La Farge's reputation and made Trinity's interior one of the great decorative achievements in American art.

The murals cover more than 21,500 square feet — roughly 2,000 square metres — of wall and vault, and they were completed entirely by American artists. Step inside and the first impression is color everywhere: deep reds, golds, and blues across the nave, the crossing, and the chancel, with figures and patterns that reward standing still and looking up. The chancel's lower apse was enriched later, in 1937–1938, with Byzantine-inspired decoration in gilt stucco, marbles, and mosaics, along with the great altar and hanging cross, to designs by the Boston firm Maginnis and Walsh. But the heart of the interior remains La Farge's campaign of the 1870s, and it is why the inside of Trinity feels so different from the cool white interiors of so many New England churches. This is not a meetinghouse. It is a painted room, built to hold a congregation of thousands in color and light.

Trinity's windows tell a second story, about how American stained glass grew up in a single generation. At the consecration in 1877 the windows were clear glass, with one exception. Within a few years, they became one of the finest collections of stained glass in the country, and the names on them read like a roll call of the art form.

Four windows were designed by the English Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones and executed by the studio of William Morris, the great English designer and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. The most famous is David's Charge to Solomon — David instructing Solomon for the building of the Temple — installed in the baptistry in 1882 as a memorial to George Minot Dexter, a member of the original building committee. Its dense, jewel-colored composition, designed by Burne-Jones with color harmonies developed by Morris, is a landmark of Victorian stained glass, and it is worth seeking out deliberately rather than discovering by accident. The Morris firm's other Trinity windows include the Nativity, the Worship of the Magi, and the Flight into Egypt scenes.

Set against them are four windows by John La Farge himself, which revolutionized window glass with their layering of opalescent glass — milky, streaked, three-dimensional sheets that catch light in a way flat painted glass never could. La Farge's Christ in Majesty lancets at the western end are the showpiece. Around these headline commissions, the church filled its remaining openings with work from the leading studios of the day — Clayton and Bell, Burlison and Grylls, Henry Holiday, and the French artist Achille François Oudinot among them — and with windows by Boston artists, including the nave aisle windows by Margaret Redmond and the Phillips Brooks memorial window in the parish house library by Sarah Wyman Whitman. Trinity's glass is, in miniature, the whole history of late-nineteenth-century stained glass, English, French, and American, in a single building.

Trinity is not a museum, and on any given week it behaves like what it is: a large, busy Episcopal parish of roughly 4,000 households, in the Diocese of Massachusetts, with three services of Holy Eucharist each Sunday and weekday services through the year. Its choirs — the Trinity Choir, Trinity Schola, Trinity Choristers, and Trinity Chamber Choir — are fixtures of Boston's musical life, touring internationally and recording to critical acclaim, and each December they offer three iterations of the Candlelight Carols service, a Boston tradition in the Nine Lessons and Carols model that draws nearly 5,000 people, with lines forming in Copley Square for the free event.

The organs are a story in themselves. The original organ was built by Hilborne L. Roosevelt in 1876; a Hutchings-Votey instrument followed in 1903, Ernest M. Skinner rebuilt the organs in the 1920s, and the nave and chancel organs together now carry 121 stops, 113 ranks, and 6,898 pipes. The parish's community work runs just as deep, through partnerships with organizations including Rosie's Place, Pine Street Inn, Habitat for Humanity, and Community Servings, and through Trinity Boston Connects, which serves hundreds of young people in the city. Trinity has long called itself, and been called, "Boston's church" — the place the city turns to for interfaith services after tragedy, for prominent funerals and consecrations, and for music at Christmas. A visit during a service is a different experience from a visit to an empty church, and both are worth having.

No visit to Trinity is complete without stepping back outside and reading the square it anchors. Copley Square was known as Art Square until 1883, when it was renamed for the painter John Singleton Copley, and its great buildings arrived in a single remarkable generation: Trinity in 1877, Old South Church in 1873, the Boston Public Library's McKim Building in 1895, and the Fairmont Copley Plaza in 1912. Then, in 1976, came the building that changed the square's geometry forever: the John Hancock Tower, 790 feet of mirrored glass designed by Henry N. Cobb of I. M. Pei's firm, the tallest building in New England.

The Hancock was controversial precisely because of Trinity. Early plans raised a public outcry that the tower would cast its shadow on the church, and Cobb's design answered by becoming deliberately quiet — a sheer glass slab whose mirrored skin dissolves the tower's bulk and throws Trinity's image back at the square, doubled. Photographers have made a career of the reflection: the rough stone church, floating in the glass of the tower behind it, old and new in a single frame. Stand on the Boylston Street side of the square at sunset, when the glass warms to gold and copper, and you will see why this is one of the most photographed views in Boston. It is also a lesson in how a city grows without erasing itself. The tower does not imitate the church, and it does not compete with it. It reflects it.

Give Trinity an unhurried hour, and divide it in three. First, walk the exterior all the way around, from the Copley Square porch to the parish house with its cloister colonnade and exterior staircase on the Clarendon Street side, and find the Saint-Gaudens statue of Phillips Brooks on the north side. Second, go inside and look up before you look around: take in the La Farge murals as a whole, then hunt down the Burne-Jones David's Charge to Solomon in the baptistry and La Farge's western lancets, and let your eyes adjust to the stained glass the way the building asks you to. Third, cross the square to the Boston Public Library's steps and look back. Trinity from the library, framed by the square, with the Hancock Tower rising behind it, is the view that explains the building's fame in a single glance.

Pairing the visit with the neighborhood is easy. Trinity sits at the edge of the Back Bay, a short walk from the Public Garden and Boston Common, from the shops and restaurants of Boylston and Newbury Streets, and from the Boston Public Library across the square — combine church and library in one outing and you will have seen two of the greatest American buildings of the nineteenth century within a hundred yards of each other. Come at Christmas for the Candlelight Carols if you can, and come on a sunny afternoon for the reflection in the Hancock Tower if you cannot.

Trinity endures because it did something no American building had done before: it proved that American architecture did not have to borrow its dignity from Europe. Richardson took a French Romanesque idea, built it in Massachusetts granite on wooden piles in a filled-in bay, filled it with American painting and English and American glass, and made something that architects across the country immediately began to copy — courthouses, libraries, train stations, and town halls in the Richardsonian Romanesque manner, from Pittsburgh to Chicago to the Pacific. The style is everywhere in America now, and it started here, on a triangular lot at the edge of Copley Square. Walk in, look up at the murals, find the Burne-Jones window, and then step outside and watch the whole church appear twice — once in stone, and once in glass. That double image is Trinity's argument, still standing after nearly a century and a half: that a building can be both rooted and reflected, both of its time and beyond it.

Address: Trinity Church, 206 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA 02116 (Copley Square, Back Bay, on the east side of the square)

Transit: Copley station on the MBTA Green Line opens directly onto Copley Square; Back Bay station (Orange Line and commuter rail) is a short walk southwest, and bus routes run along Boylston Street and around the square.

Hours/Admission: Hours, tour schedules, and any admission or suggested donation for tours change from time to time — check the church's official website (trinitychurchboston.org) before visiting to confirm current hours, tour times, and service schedules. The church is an active parish, so visiting hours may vary around services and events.

Best timing: Allow an unhurried hour: walk the full exterior first, then go inside for the La Farge murals and the Burne-Jones baptistry window, then cross to the Boston Public Library steps for the classic view back across the square. Late afternoon gives the best light for the church's reflection in the John Hancock Tower. Pair the visit with the Boston Public Library across the square, and with the Public Garden and Boston Common a short walk west.