"I used Ruskin for the design of one of the footbridges in Germany and for a project called Joe & Joey. The bridge is called the Ruskin Bridge, by the way."
"I am one hundred percent Digital Arts and Crafts." — Lars Spuybroek, "The Aesthetics of Variation,"
"I think all architecture should be an art work first, and as Ruskin would say, carry "the lamp of life." — "The Lives that are hidden."
Lars Spuybroek, the Dutch twentieth- and twenty-first-century neo-Ruskinian architect and architectural theorist, boasts with some pride, I expect, "I think I'm the only one left who likes to read Ruskin." That's not quite accurate, given the enormous Ruskin industry that now exists in scholarly disciplines rangng from the expected English literature and art and architectural history to economics, politics, and religion. But he's right that few contemporary architects have anything to say about Ruskin, good or bad.
Spuybroek has many reasons for liking Ruskin so much, starting with the fact that Ruskin, a good hater, "hated the Renaissance and idealism — just perfect." Then, too, "he launched Turner to everlasting fame." But what the Dutch architect (who holds professorships in Germany and the United States) finds most appealing relates to the Victorian sage's understanding of Gothic: "He calls Gothic "foliated," and — on his list of the characteristics of the Gothic, he puts "savageness" at the top, and then "changefulness" — that's even more perfect." High on Spuybroek's reasons for his love of Ruskin are his anticipations, if you will, of his own interest in the digital, for "As far as I know, he drew the first algorithmic tree, the diagrammatic code of a tree, like an L-system. And a logarithmic acanthus leaf, too."
And Ruskin painted the most beautiful rocks and geological formations — absolutely mindblowingly beautiful. He was a mountaineer. The stones of Venice were overtaken by the mountains of Switzerland. In The Stones of Venice, there's a chapter called "The Material of Ornament." I can't see anything wrong with that man.
"Lines of this kind are beautiful," he says in that chapter, referring to the lines of ornament that stem from natural curves like glaciers, worms and leaves, "because almost all these lines are expressive of action or of force of some kind, while the circle is a line of limitation or support. In leafage they mark the forces of its growth and expansion, but some among the most beautiful of them are described by bodies variously in motion, or subjected to force: as by projectiles in the air, by the particles of water in a gentle current, [...] by clouds in various action upon the wind, et cetera." [258-59]
One central point of agreement comes from "Ruskin's position on the Gothic as an aesthetic-ethical one, as he himself always stressed. For him, variety was a concept of life. It was a structure of open form, unvollendet, open to change, not finished and not perfect." In "Steel and Freedom," he says that,
Like Worringer, he views the Gothic as an architecture of life. He says, "Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of a state of progress and change." He calls the Gothic an architecture of "changefulness." He talks about "the perpetual variety of every feature of a building," and an "active rigidity; the peculiar energy which gives tension to its movement." These are all quotes from "The Nature of Gothic," a chapter in The Stones of Venice. [ 268-69]
Spuybroek confesses, "I have to admit that sometimes I go very, very far in my appreciation of the Gothic — if not to the point of becoming Ruskinian," but in fact he often sounds very like a true Ruskinian. The author of The Stones of Venice, we remember, looked aghast at most of the Gothic Revival structures done in his name, particularly those built in Venetian Gothic, which had developed in a particular society situated in a specific climate with its own characteristic light. According to him, each culture has to develop its own equivalent to Gothic, and this claim, as historians of architecture have shown, resulted in Ruskin's inspiring vernacular revivals from Hungary to the American Southwest. Spuybroek therefore writes in complete accord with Ruskin's wider principles when he reminds us that "Gothic and the neo-Gothic is everything I've described, but in stone" (258), and "things are not in stone anymore: our era is not monolithic but composite. Steel has added tension to our structures. So we need to take the methods and rigor of the Gothic to another level." Ruskin may have hated building with steel, as Spuybroek himself emphasizes, but he still follows the Victorian critic's larger program.
In arguing that architecture must merge "abstraction and empathy," Spuybroek points to both Ruskin and Worringer, who "states that Gothic structure is sensuous and evokes empathy." Ruskin, in contrast, views "ornament . . . as material and therefore potentially structural. It is inevitable that they meet halfway. It is also inevitable that they will be revived, because our digital tools enable that. Gaudí, Morris and Ruskin would hate me for saying it, but their sensibility is fully returning without the ideology of artisan hand labor. I am one hundred percent Digital Arts and Crafts. I understand all life as aesthetic — and configurational, and constructivist. We all long for this. We have been ripped off by modernism and postmodernism.
Bibliography
Spuybroek, Lars. The Architecture of Continuity: Essays and Conversations. Rotterdam: V_2 Publishing, 2008.
Last modified 1 May 2024