Look up at the massive Romanesque towers of Dedham granite dominating Copley Square. Trinity Church was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and completed in 1877, its massive Romanesque towers of Dedham granite dominating Copley Square. Richardson developed a new architectural style from this building — Richardsonian Romanesque, the heavy masonry arches and rough-cut stone that influenced architects from Louis Sullivan to Frank Lloyd Wright — and Trinity Church is its defining expression.
The interior, painted in deep jewel colors by John La Farge and his assistants, is one of the most extraordinary rooms in American architecture. The building sits on 4,502 wooden piles driven into the landfill of Back Bay; the original estimate of the site's bearing capacity was wrong, and the towers began settling unevenly almost immediately, a problem that has been managed by engineers ever since. Copley Square is defined by Trinity Church on one side and the Boston Public Library on the other, a pairing of religious and civic authority that represents the ambitions of Back Bay in the Gilded Age.
The library, designed by McKim, Mead and White and opened in 1895, contains murals by John Singer Sargent and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.