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The Seven Lamps of Architecture

John Ruskin

Book Overview: 

The Seven Lamps of Architecture, is an extended essay written by the English art critic and theorist John Ruskin. The 'lamps' of the title are Ruskin's principles of architecture, which he later enlarged upon in the three-volume The Stones of Venice. To an extent, they codified some of the contemporary thinking behind the Gothic Revival. At the time of its publication A.W.N. Pugin and others had already advanced the ideas of the Revival and it was well under way in practice. Ruskin offered little new to the debate, but the book helped to capture and summarize the thoughts of the movement. The Seven Lamps also proved a great popular success, and received the approval of the ecclesiologists typified by the Cambridge Camden Society, who criticized in their publication The Ecclesiologist lapses committed by modern architects in ecclesiastical commissions.(Summary from Wikipedia)

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .to guard against in recent times, is one which, nevertheless, comes in a "questionable shape," and of which it is not easy to determine the proper laws and limits; I mean the use of iron. The definition of the art of architecture, given in the first chapter, is independent of its materials: nevertheless, that art having been, up to the beginning of the present century, practised for the most part in clay, stone, or wood, it has resulted that the sense of proportion and the laws of structure have been based, the one altogether, the other in great part, on the necessities consequent on the employment of those materials; and that the entire or principal employment of metallic framework would, therefore, be generally felt as a departure from the first principles of the art. Abstract[Pg 44]edly there appears no reason why iron should not be used as well as wood; and the time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metal. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Iconic ramblings by madman ruskin SO seminal!!

I thought it might've been about Architecture. It wasn't really. It wasn't even about lamps.

Five stars to Ruskin for surprising me with beautiful prose and some fascinating perspectives, and two stars deducted for being - what we today might call - a bloody weirdo.

What I learned?
The Importance of Being Ornamental.

It's slow reading, because I have to put myself in Ruskin "headspace" whenever I pick it up. I remember blitzing through it in college, but I was taking a Victorian lit class, and it was all Victorian English, all the time.

"I could smile when I hear the hopeful exultation of many, at the new reach of worldly science, and vigor of worldly effort; as if we were again at the beginning of days. There is thunder on the horizon as well as dawn. The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar."

That delightfully a

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