John Ruskin

John Ruskin's name is one you often hear associated with the development of modern European thought. And there's good reason for it: so far as I can tell, he wrote about most everything: from architecture and philosophy, to history, biology, and drawing.  

I wanted to learn more about Ruskin and so have made my way through several of the essays in the volume published by Oxford. Those that I enjoyed most, actually, focused on architecture, and on its intractable influence on identity (both in the sense of individual identity as well as of the character of cities and nations).

Ruskin by and large offers a conservative - or at least traditional - vision of the European past. He repeatedly associates the built environment with a sort of golden age, endowing it with metaphysical grandeur. Modernity, he asserts, has waged war on this grandeur, puncturing an endless bridge to the past. Our moral fabric, essentially, has been corrupted. 

Ruskin is clear: "Do not let us talk then of restoration...Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them." The modern landscape, he argues, is one of "crutches," one in which historic buildings are so gravely attacked that what remains resembles a soldier, propped up with "unsightly aid." 

In some ways, Ruskin reminded me of Edmund Burke, developing as he did a sort of generational argument, lobbying for the continuity of structures, and the inability of one revolutionary generation to sacrifice that which is not truly theirs. "The dead," writes Ruskin, "have still their right." And so in this sense, we, the present generation, function as guardians, as caretakers. "The people who destroy anything causelessly," he concludes, "are a mob, and architecture is always destroyed causelessly." 

It's clear that Ruskin struggled at times - and this point is made clear in the excellent introduction to the Oxford edition by Dinah Birch - to fully articulate the effects of this destruction. Ruskin, of course, was able to articulate beauty: he did so, after all, with considerable success. But about the "infinite nastiness" of urban development and the assault on the built environment, he slipped and tripped in his language. It was as if Ruskin located in the expansion of nineteenth-century European cities an end to the old world he'd known, one in which structures were endowed with intrinsic moral and social codes.

"I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only," wrote Ruskin. Living as I do in an American city where urban development has increased exponentially over the past five years, I cannot help but agree.