Event Details

In this session Dr Thomas Hughes (Courtauld Institute) will kick-off the term’s events with a consideration of the importance of Ruskin’s ideas about the Gothic to contemporary ideas in architecture and ecology.

Abstract. The central chapter of the middle volume of Ruskin’s trilogy The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), ‘The Nature of Gothic’, describes ideal qualities of ‘Gothicness’ to be used to judge or construct architecture, architectural ornament and even artistic forms generally. Central to this Gothicness is ‘Naturalism’, the loving experience and interpretation of nature by human hands, hearts and minds. Some stunning work has recently elucidated Ruskin’s emphasis on surface and his preference for the solid walls of Veronese or indeed Venetian ‘Surface Gothic’ over the foliation-eaten lacework of the French, ‘Linear’ variety. However, I will argue Ruskin theorises kinds of depth residing beneath the surface of Surface Gothic. Ruskin’s ‘Naturalism’ amounts to a theory of the movement of ‘form’ between the surface and the depth of architectural material. This Gothic movement of form is a political dynamic: it enables the individual workman to work freely and to interpret nature in his (or her) own imperfect, loving way. With this, Ruskin envisages a way out of the nightmare of modernity he sees happening all over Europe and which he reimagines in his part-history, part-myth of the rise and terrible fall of Venice. I will talk about how Ruskin’s contradictory though highly generative theory is important to contemporary ideas in architecture and ecology, before concluding that Ruskin’s Gothic form is historically unstable and exists in a Venice both lost and found.