John Ruskin and Architectural Truth: Part I

William Morris, in his preface to the Kelmscott Press edition of the Nature of Gothic, summarises the relationship between honest labour and architectural beauty when he writes: the lessons Ruskin teaches us is that art is the expression of man’s pleasure; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work. For strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it and as lastly that unless man’s work once again becomes pleasure to him, the token of which change will be that beauty is once again a natural and necessary accompaniment of productive labour.

Ruskin draws a sharp destination between the act of building and the concept of architecture in which architecture becomes something that is achieved only when ‘certain characters, venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary’ are added to a construction. In his Stones of Venice, Ruskin writes, ’the man who chose to curve and number the stones, had to know the times and tides of the river, and the strength of its floods, and the height and flow of them...and the width of the stones he had to build with’. In other words, the artisans contribute an equal, if sometimes greater, amount of effort into a structure’s creation as does the architect himself. Brooks argues that this illustrates Ruskin as advocating the Carlylian principle of the ‘human beaver’ in which there is a large gap between building and architecture, between the intellect and the imagination. Ruskin not only preferred masses of stone, but advocated ornamentation that was conducive to light and shade as well as the play of light and shadow on a building’s exterior awakens, within each of us, an archetypal image that we are able to acknowledge psychologically which becomes ‘an equivalent of the trouble and wrath of life for sorrow and its mystery’. For no building is truly superior without ‘mighty masses, with ‘vigorous and deep shadows mingled with its surface’.

One of Ruskin’s students offers a first hand review of Ruskin’s teachings. Mr Ash, was a foreman with the firm of Hart and Son, ecclesiastical and domestic ironworkers, a firm which specialised in brass and wrought iron for such well-known architects as Butterfield and Seddon. Mr Ash was a firm believer in Ruskinian Gothic for he too believed that ‘architecture embraced not only the artists, but artisans’. At a lecture delivered on April 1856, at the

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