The Seven Lamps of Architecture is an extended essay, first published in May 1849 and 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.
Later Proust, who translated some works of Ruskin, claimed to know The Seven Lamps of Architecture by heart. Seven Lamps of Architecture and other of Ruskin's writings on architecture are summarized and extensively quoted in John Unrau, Looking at Architecture with Ruskin (Toronto: University of Toronto), 1978.
Some specific points of architectural criticism made in The Seven Lamps of Architecture are difficult to follow. The examples John Ruskin points to were drawn from a canon of Continental and English buildings that few readers now have at their command. But if the particulars seem dated, the lamps are still luminous.
For Ruskin, architecture was the first of the arts, because it was not created by a person, but rather by a culture (his primary examples being cathedrals that took, in some cases, hundreds of years to create).
In 1899 Marcel Proust read a translation of Ruskin's chapter The Lamp of Memory in a Belgian magazine. He projected the transforming experience onto the narrator of Du côté de chez Swann, who describes himself as a boy reading the piece in the garden at Combray.
Put it in the drawing-room, not into the workshop; put it on domestic furniture, not upon tools of handicraft.". For Ruskin, Beauty was not an inherent characteristic but a thing that could be applied to an object or withheld from it.
The Seven Lamps also proved a great popular success, and received the approval of the ecclesiologists typified by the Cambridge Camden Society, who criticised in their publication The Ecclesiologist lapses committed by modern architects in ecclesiastical commissions.
All Saints is considered the first Ruskinian building due to its use of brick 'honestly' employed as a structural system rather than for surface decoration. Ruskin's writings became a significant influence on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement in the latter half of the 19th century.
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 ...
The 'Lamps'. The essay was published in book form in May 1849 and is structured with eight chapters; an introduction and one chapter for each of the seven 'Lamps', which represent the demands that good architecture must meet, expressed as directions in which the association of ideas may take the observer: Sacrifice – dedication of man's craft ...
By 1849, A. W. N. Pugin and others had already advanced the ideas of the Gothic Revival and its popularity was secured. Ruskin offered little new to the debate, but the book helped to capture and summarise the thoughts of the movement, proved a great popular success, and received the approval of The ecclesiologists, the influential newsletter of architectural criticism published by the Cambridge Camden Society. Effects such as the polychromy of High Victorian Gothic architecture may be traced to him, in a genre of "Ruskinian Gothic" that was practised in Britain and colonies like New Zealand and Canada, and in Anglophile strata of the United States.
I loved many of the footnotes, poetry, sideways meanders. The Seven Lamps are also just a little bit mad: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, Obedience. So biblical. This contains so much of such desperate earnestness it cannot help but be touching. It has lovely passages that in truth could make you see and think differently. It celebrates the beauty of skilled craftsmanship and manual labour. It’s easy to see why Ruskin is always paired with William Morris in the same architectural breath.
Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power and pleasure.