Ruskin and Architecture

John Ruskin exerted a powerful and pervading influence on architects and architecture in the nineteenth century and his legacy can still be felt today. His highly individual (and idiosyncratic) prose encouraged the lay person to look and think about architecture and he covered strands as diverse as the choice of style, the use of polychromy, the relations between the workman and his work, and even between politics and the arts. In this book leading experts in Ruskin and architectural history re-examine these and numerous other issues, often providing wholly new insights into the man, his writings and his influence upon architecture and the cultural landscape of his day and since. The essays that make up this substantial and richly illustrated book, shed new and revealing light on the wide-ranging and profound influence of this great writer and thinker on architecture.

Table of Contents

Foreword
David Barrie

Introduction: Ruskinisms
Michael Brooks

1 Ruskin’s Architectural Heritage: The Seven Lamps of Architecture –
Reception and Legacy
Gill Chitty

2 ‘As beautiful as anything I know in civil Gothic’, or ‘a very shabby bit of work
of mine’: Ruskin and the Oxford University Museum
Peter Howell

3 Ruskin and the English House
Geoffrey Tyack

4 Labor ipse voluptas: Scott, Street, Ruskin, and the Value of Work
Brian Hanson

5 Ruskin and the Politics of Gothic
Chris Brooks

6 ‘Intellectual Lens and Moral Retina’: A Reappraisal of Ruskin’s Architectural Vision
Malcolm Hardman

7 Ruskin and Pugin
Rosemary Hill

8 G. F. Bodley and the Response to Ruskin in Ecclesiastical Architecture in the 1850s
Michael Hall

9 ‘Theoria’ in Practice: E. W. Godwin, Ruskin and Art-Architecture
Aileen Reid

10 John Dando Sedding and Sculpture in Architecture:
The Fulfilment of a Ruskinian Ideal?
Paul Snell

11 Ruskin Today: Building the Ruskin Library, Lancaster
Richard MacCormac

Notes on contributors

Index