ABSTRACTS

Chatterjee, Anuradha. ‘Tectonic into textile: John Ruskin and the changing meanings of wall and ornament.’ Textile: the journal of cloth and culture (expected 2008).

This paper considers the architectural writings of John Ruskin (1891-1900), an important architecture, art, and social critic in Victorian England. It interprets Ruskin’s preoccupation with the surface ornament. The paper demonstrates that Ruskin viewed architecture as a living entity. His idea of life was spiritual, not physical. It was influenced by the writings of Thomas Carlyle. For Carlyle, the soul of the human being was more important than the body, and it could be expressed only through clothing. Ruskin translated these ideas into an architectural theory. He believed that the soul of architecture (its meaning) was contained in the decorative symbols. Therefore, throughout his career as a historian and critic, he focused on the architectural surface. This gave rise to the theory of the adorned ‘wall veil’. Architecture was required to have an adorned wall veil, a planar external masonry wall that was masked and decorated with a dress-like veneer of chromatic and relief ornamentation. Through these findings, the paper argues that Ruskin’s writings were not unarchitectural. They made a profound but subtle contribution to architectural theory in the nineteenth century, specifically the debates on dress and architecture, and by challenging the meaning of representation and its relation to the tectonic aspects of architecture.

Chatterjee, Anuradha, ‘John Ruskin and femininity as the theoretical precondition for architecture.’ Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (expected 2008).

This paper considers the architectural writings of John Ruskin (1891-1900), an important architecture, art, and social critic in Victorian England. It focuses on the issue of gender, and it demonstrates that Ruskin went against the grain of the established tradition in architectural theory. Classical and Gothic revival theorists used the metaphor of sexual difference to distinguish between styles of architecture, and to differentiate Gothic from classical architecture. However, Ruskin considered femininity as the fundamental and philosophical condition of architecture. Irrespective of style, typology, or period, architecture was regarded as an analogue of the dressed female body. The paper develops this argument by drawing on Ruskin scholarship, and by examining his theory of creative labour, his definition of architecture, and his interest in the myth of the woman born dressed in classical mythology. The paper considers the implications of the central finding – the feminized status of architecture. First, it argues that the relation between production (labour, craft) and representation (ornamentation, symbol) was informed by the idea of sexually differentiated bodies. Second, it argues that the idea of dressing was used to differentiate architecture from building, thereby giving rise to a new definition of architecture. Architecture was synonymous with the act of creating and adding decorative surfaces. Third, the paper argues that the analogy between the construction of the building and the myth of the first woman born dressed ruled out attached ornamentation, and encouraged the use of ornamental cladding. The paper shows that Ruskin used gender as a tool for ascertaining the disciplinary boundaries and limits of architecture.

Chatterjee, Anuradha. ‘The Troubled Surface of Architecture: John Ruskin, Human Body, and External Walls.’ PhD diss., University of New South Wales, 2008

The meaning of the architectural surface was thoroughly reconsidered by architects and historians in England and Europe between early and mid-nineteenth century. There were two major trends. The first one was historicist. Ornament and colour was considered important because it represented the origins of architecture. The second approach was rational and tectonic. It suggested that an honest surface had to be created by emphasizing the structure and by truthfully expressing materials. An unusual response to these debates was John Ruskin’s history of medieval and Renaissance architecture. This was published as The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and the three volume study, The Stones of Venice (1851-1853). Ruskin’s writings were difficult to grasp. On the one hand, they were fragmented, historically inaccurate, and lacking in explanatory power. On the other hand, they emphasized surface ornament, without ever indicating its architectural ‘use’. As a result, nineteenth and twentieth century historians and architects declared Ruskin’s writings as being irrelevant to architectural theory and practice. By examining Ruskin’s writings on architecture through the theoretical lens of dress, body, and gender, the thesis demonstrates that he proposed the theory of the adorned ‘wall veil’. This was a two-part theory. Firstly, architecture was defined by the presence of planar walls. The masonry structure of these walls was masked and decorated by a seamless dress-like surface, consisting of relief and polychromatic ornaments. Secondly, Ruskin distinguished between the ideal and the corrupt dress. The ideal dress celebrated the spiritual aspects of the body (surface, skin, and colour). The corrupt dress represented the scientific image of the body (depth, bones and muscles, and form). The ideal dress was reflected by the surfaces of medieval buildings, and the corrupt dress was mirrored by the Renaissance architectural surface. Through these arguments, the thesis makes two major contributions. Firstly, it shows that Ruskin’s views were consistent with the architectural modernism of the twentieth century, in which the free façade and the atectonic surface were key concerns. Secondly, it establishes that Gottfried Semper’s writings were not the sole origin of the debates on dress and architecture. It shows that Ruskin developed a critical theory of dress by synthesizing debates on gender, science, and spirituality. He used this theory to suggest a new approach towards architecture.

Stiles, Mark. ‘Reading Ruskin: Architecture, Social Reform and the Order of Things in Colonial Australia 1880-1906.’ PhD diss., University of New South Wales, expected late 2008.

This examines the reception of Ruskin's thought in Australia 1880-1906 by looking at four groups : ordinary readers, architects, the labour movement, and suffragists. The link between them is the search for social justice in an unstable colonial society on the eve of Federation