ABSTRACTS

Anuradha Chatterjee. 2008. Surfacing the image of (an)other science: John Ruskin, anatomy, and post-Renaissance architecture
Anuradha Chatterjee. 2008. Reconciling architectures: John Ruskin and the production of the new theory of the adorned “wall veil”.
Mark Andrew Frost. 2006.“The law of help”: John Ruskin's ecological vision. 1843—1886.
Anita Grants. 2006. Selectivity, interpretation and application: The influence of John Ruskin in Canada.
Philip Harrison. 2009. Ruskin on Gothic skin: embodiment in health and diseaser.
Kurt Espersen-Peters. Ruskin’s Material Nature: The Geology of Architecture (Working Title).

Anuradha Chatterjee. 2008. Surfacing the image of (an)other science: John Ruskin, anatomy, and post-Renaissance architecture. Paper to be presented at Innovation, Inspiration and Instruction: New Knowledge in the Architectural Sciences, ANZAScA 2008 Conference, November 26-28, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia.

In nineteenth century, science interacted with architectural theory either as the rationalistic interpretation of buildings or the application of rationalized technology. John Ruskin was critical of the integration of science into architectural thought. However, his objects of criticism were unexpected. He believed that scientific thought was reflected in Renaissance, Baroque, and nineteenth century Neo-Renaissance architecture. The reason for this was his unusual definition of science and architecture. Firstly, Ruskin believed that the worst science of all was anatomy, because of which artistic representations of the human body brought the inner musculature and skeletal structure to the surface. The rippled surface of the body in these representations was reflected in the disordered and flamboyant surface of Baroque drapery. Secondly, Ruskin believed that the only part of architecture worth studying was the surface, which was analogous to the dress of the human body. As architecture was analogous to dress, Ruskin believed that the surface of Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-Renaissance buildings evoked the formal quality of Baroque draperies. These assumptions occluded the scientific aspects of architecture, such as structure, mechanics of load bearing, and construction. It laid the foundation for a new theory in which the constructed quality of architecture had to be concealed in order to reveal a science that was outside its disciplinary domain.

Anuradha Chatterjee. 2008. Reconciling architectures: John Ruskin and the production of the new theory of the adorned “wall veil”. Paper to be presented at International Conference: Ruskin, Venice, and 19th Century Cultural Travel, September 25-27, in Venice Italy.

One of the most important consequences of John Ruskin’s travels to Italy, France, and Germany was the historical documentation of architecture published as The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice, 3 volumes (1851-53). These works were intended to serve as a tool with which the nineteenth century theory of architecture could be recast, as a result of which they have had little historical credibility amongst architectural historians. Ruskin produced a new theory of architecture that has up until now been overlooked. The paper terms this as the theory of the adorned “wall veil”. According to this theory, architecture was considered synonymous with the act of constructing and decorating exterior wall planes. All exterior wall planes were analogous to dressed bodies. Furthermore, all styles of architecture demonstrated this analogy to varying degrees. This is explained through a literary and semiotic interpretation of St Marks’s Basilica and Ducal Palace in Venice. The paper responds to the theme of the conference by demonstrating the importance of the visible (the architectural surface) in Ruskin’s re-definition of architecture, and by delineating the creative outcome(s) of his architectural tours. It paper draws on original research from my doctoral dissertation, “The Troubled Surface of Architecture: John Ruskin, Human Body, and External Walls (2008)”.

Mark Andrew Frost. 2006.“The law of help”: John Ruskin's ecological vision. 1843—1886. PhD diss., University of Southampton.

The impact of ecology on Ruskin's writings has been almost entirely neglected. Remedying this situation permits a much greater understanding of the totality of his work and of his contribution to a number of trends in nineteenth century culture to emerge. What guided Ruskin's attempts to understand and analyse the realms of art, architecture, nature, and society was a model of growth and creativity that was drawn specifically from an emerging nineteenth century ecological culture. In order to outline the nature of this model of creativity, it is necessary to show that it was manifested in his analyses of natural systems, but also that this model was extended to his accounts of artistic creation and social formation. Just as crucially, I will demonstrate that this model can be traced within his literary work, in texts such as Modern Painters (5 vols., 1843--60) which reflected ecological order through their approach to enquiry, and by their structure. Ruskin's texts often set up rigid, logical, and hierarchical systems of apparently objective investigation only to break them down in favour of enquiries that pursued connection, relation, mutuality, dynamic process, and proliferation. Such texts were not internally static, but engaged in a process of development. They did not produce stable or definitive positions, but continued to grow in response to the wider fields of intellectual activity in which they were situated. Ruskin was unable to treat subjects in isolation: his intersubjective practice was again a marker of an ecological mode of intellectual organisation.

After examining a range of Ruskin's texts from the period up to 1860 in order to outline how this ecological model of creative organisation played out at textual and subjective levels, I show how Ruskin's studies of nature mark his extended participation in the emergent science of ecology, and that understanding this complicates any reading of Ruskin's relations with that other new Victorian science, evolutionary theory. In particular, it is possible to show that the belief that Ruskin's science rested on Enlightenment and religious models has been overstated. The simultaneous presence of these and of ecological models created an irresolvable tension in Ruskin's engagements with scientific culture, a tension that was manifested in the partial erasure of ecology from his later, mythopoetic botany. However, ecological models of enquiry were so deeply embedded in his approach to study that they re-emerged in near forms in later readings of nature such as Proserpina (1875--1886). Finally, I reassess Ruskin's relations with Darwinism, and to argue that his rejection of evolutionary theory arose only after the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). This insight clarifies the nature of Ruskin's attitude during the latter half of his career to ecology, gender, and religious issues, and suggests that it may be necessary to temper or modify recent positive readings of Ruskin's late science and position on gender.

Anita Grants. 2006. Selectivity, interpretation and application: The influence of John Ruskin in Canada. PhD diss., Concordia University.

In Victorian-era English Canada John Ruskin's ideas were perhaps as well-known as they were in Britain. However, without the controlling presence of Ruskin, admirers were free to select and re-interpret his positions without fear of reproach, and in such a way that their projects would be given added credibility by association. The individuals who did this believed that their interpretation and understanding of Ruskin's writings was valid, and often those views, rather than Ruskin's were re-interpreted and expressed. He was not the agent of his influence, but was instead a source to be referred to as needed. Certainly this was not a universal circumstance in Canada, but occurred frequently enough to be significant.

Beginning with an examination of the problems of defining the term "influence", the nature of Ruskin's influence in Canada from the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century is presented. The influence of Ruskin's writings is analysed through a discussion of examples from the following fields: commercial, institutional, and public architecture; art education and training in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia; and trends in painting. In terms of architecture, Ruskin's ideology was not always taken into account, especially as the north Italian style he championed became more popular. Thus, while the Canadian Houses of Parliament, University College, Toronto, Canadian Institute, and Montreal YMCA may have been relatively true to his principles, the commercial projects of Charles Wilson (Montreal), John Macdonald and Robert Carswell (Toronto) were anything but. The discussion of art education considers how Ruskin's theories were adapted to suit the needs of educators, and then readapted as their interpretations of these theories evolved. Oscar Wilde's 1884 Canadian lectures contained much unacknowledged Ruskin; Fred Brigden, who had studied at the Working Men's College, continued to call himself an art workman after his emigration to Canada; and Arthur Lismer, having been educated in a Sheffield which revered Ruskin, who from early in his career repeated many of the critic's comments and opinions, quoting at length from his writings. The study concludes by examining Ruskin's influence on artists in Canada.

Philip Harrison. 2009 (Expected). Ruskin on Gothic skin: embodiment in health and disease, PhD diss., University of Lancaster.

The dissertation demonstrates a corporeal experience, all about the body of Ruskin’s discourse on buildings. Clinically, a post-mortem report, it is an analysis that medically dissects his architectural descriptions of rough, or smooth, skin. To be more precise, it focuses on the skin, the surface of buildings or people, with an analysis of Ruskin’s writings. Ruskin’s potent prescriptions on the Gothic skin, the skin of Gothic buildings, were mostly contained within the central body of his architectural works, in two anatomically related treatises: The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice. The thesis places equal emphasis on Ruskin, human body, and skin. Since Ruskin spent quite a lot of his life confronting illness, interspersed with periods of health, he saw two faces to buildings, as with people, their good and bad sides. His writings were full of disease descriptors and health-related metaphors. Therefore, in a descriptive and a dermatological sense, the thesis explores the morbid language of the human body and its skin. It covers a wide range of aesthetics as used by Ruskin in buildings. As aesthetics is the science or art of the way a building looks and is all about surface, the judgement on the skin and its well-being becomes a crucial analytical framework for the thesis. It is argued that Ruskin looked at the skin of buildings with the eye of a doctor, in a traditional rather than modern sense of the word. The traditional medical approach was concerned with surface signs or symptoms of health or disease. It was an empathetic and sympathetic way of examining inside the body through the skin. The thesis intends to present a medical examination of the Gothic skin. It will deploy as well as negotiate two methodologies – a pathological one that draws upon my own clinical experience as a dermatologist, and an artistic one which will analyse buildings through the eyes of Ruskin.

Kurt Espersen-Peters. In Progress. Ruskin’s Material Nature: The Geology of Architecture (Working Title). McGill School of Architecture.

This thesis investigates the influence of John Ruskin’s vision of geology on his later understanding of architecture. Ruskin’s lifelong interest in geology, mineralogy, and landscape is well known. As a student at Oxford, he participated in the geological debates at the Geological Society, such as the quarrels over aprioristic versus inductive reasoning, the correlation between the Mosiac account of creation and empirical evidence, and, even more interesting for Ruskin, the effects of glacier erosion on mountain form. Ruskin’s geology centred upon mountain form and its meaning in his vision of landscape. Unlike many of the geologists of his day, he indicated little interest in “unknown ages and immeasurable forces” of the earth’s creation, preferring to study the form of the world “since man was man.” It was an account of physical phenomena nourished by representations in art, architecture, and literature.

For Ruskin, mountain form existed as a ruin, product of a process of degradation rather than an act of creation. It was also a characteristic of architectural monuments: in the Seven Lamps Ruskin argued that the intention of a building was to age and decay, becoming a sublime ruin which could elicit contemplation and a sense of wonder in the beholder. Decay was not a creative force ex nihilo but an “unsculpturing” force that gave shape and meaning to physical form. In Ruskin’s mind, the creation of the world and its agencies held an unquestionable divine guarantee. In his later writings on geology and architecture, such as The Ethics of the Dust, Deucalion, and The Queen of the Air, these theories of divine decay were articulated into governing rules and laws personified in the figure of Athena, Ruskin’s mythic figure of Wisdom. Wisdom correctly governed the shaping forces of both natural phenomena and true architecture—it was form-giving through agency and craft.

By providing the shaping forces of natural phenomena with a law and a moral significance, Ruskin was addressing a geological issue that caused him much distress: how to rid the discipline of anthropomorphic association. The process of inductive geological investigation presented a world of an unimaginable age structured by arbitrary forces devoid of any recognizable intentions. A nature devoid of moral significance troubled Ruskin and in response he sought to re-mythologize natural phenomena, giving physical form an intention and thus significance in the mind of the beholder. Ruskin was certainly not the only geologist—amateur or professional—who struggled with the issue of an increasing lack of meaning in the physical world. In fact, many of the geologists read by Ruskin, such as Buckland, Lyell, and Sedgwick, struggled with the same spiritual and moral implications. As these professional sought to reconcile their doubts with the rock records of nature, Ruskin simultaneously gave creative expression to his observations of the physical world by integrating them with his literary and artistic understanding of landscape. Explaining the process of form-giving was essential for him to give meaning to the creative process evident in mountain form, landscape, and architecture.

In this essay, I will proceed in three steps: first, I will give an overview of Ruskin’s understanding of geology since “man was man” and his relationship with the geological community; second, I will examine his major geological texts (Modern Painters Volume 4 and Deucalion) to determine his vision of geology and; third, I will examine Ethics of the Dust and Queen of the Air to determine Ruskin’s geology of architecture, paying particular attention to the idea of the ruin and the role of the craftsman in his geological and architectural theories. Geology and architecture are analogous in Ruskin’s theory of nature and art in that they both are actively shaped by an enlightened craftsman and both evolve towards a sublime state of decay. In examining Ruskin’s approach to geology, it is possible to widen the investigation of his (much studied) architectural thought into his later writings while also providing a stronger understanding of the significant influence and extent that geology had on his vision of the physical and moral world.