John Ruskin: The Seven Lamps of Architecture

In 1849 John Ruskin published an article called The Seven Lamps of Architecture. In this he distills the
essence of the Gothic Revival down to seven “lamps”. They are as follows:

1. Sacrifice
2. Truth
3. Power
4. Beauty
5. Life
6. Memory
7. Obedience

These aren’t guides for how to create a building. These are the foundations for building with integrity, at
least to the mind of John Ruskin. Ruskin himself was a theoretician and a critic more than an artist or
architect, but he was also a great writer and his writings and lectures captured the imagination of a good
many architects of his day and on to the present.

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', [2] which represent the demands that good
architecture must meet, expressed as directions in which the association of ideas may take the observer:
[3]

1. Sacrifice – dedication of man's craft to God, as visible proofs of man's love and obedience

2. Truth – handcrafted and honest display of materials and structure. Truth to materials and
honest display of construction were bywords since the serious Gothic Revival had distanced
itself from the whimsical "Gothick" of the 18th century; it had been often elaborated by Pugin
and others.

3. Power – buildings should be thought of in terms of their massing and reach towards
the sublimity of nature by the action of the human mind upon them and the organization of
physical effort in constructing buildings.

4. Beauty – aspiration towards God expressed in ornamentation drawn from nature, his creation

5. Life – buildings should be made by human hands, so that the joy of masons and stonecarvers is
associated with the expressive freedom given them

6. Memory – buildings should respect the culture from which they have developed

7. Obedience – no originality for its own sake, but conforming to the finest among existing English
values, in particular expressed through the "English Early Decorated" Gothic as the safest choice
of style.
7. Obedience - “The architecture of a nation is great only when it is as universal and as established as it
language”. John Ruskin asserted that England should have one school of architecture, a type of Gothic
that was peculiarly English.

The last point touches upon an interesting point within architecture. Various schools of architecture
have their own way of looking at things and they are usually quite willing to anathematize anyone who
strays from their orthodoxy. Ruskin presents seven lamps that shed light upon architecture. Take his
light of “Truth”. There are many buildings that have a certain pretension. They pretend to be something
they are not. A Greek Revival house made of wood will pretend to have a great stone entablature, but it
does not. With John Ruskin’s lamp we can see it as a fraud and an ugly thing. But view that same
building with someone else’s light and we can recognize the beauty and proportion that the wood
entablature offers to what is otherwise a humble dwelling.

The architectural concepts presented here are like that. They are paradigms not laws. They provide
viewpoints, but in the end most people will not understand the concepts. They will simply look at a
building and think “I like that” or “What were they thinking?” They are not an unworthy audience for
not understanding the concept. The concept was deficient or it was applied incorrectly, or perhaps there
are some things that will always simply be a matter of taste.

John Ruskin's Seven Lamps have inspired much of what is good, and some of what is bad, in the many
decades since their publication. What follows is a deeper explanation of his lamps, but Ruskin took
dozens of pages to develop these ideas, and I can only offer a few paragraphs.
Sacrifice –Let me borrow from the Bible to explain this. “Do everything as unto the Lord”. Do it well as if
you were trying to please God with your design and craft.

Truth – Your buildings should be honest in how they present themselves. No fancy facades hiding poor
construction. No wood pretending to be stone.

Power – A building is a shape, a mass. Its immensity in comparison to man has its own effect apart from
its ornamentation. The architect’s job is to display this shape to its best effect. Ruskin considers setting
and view and line. A building set on a hill can have its mass well displayed. That same building with
massive mountains as the backdrop may not seem so consequential. Surround it with buildings and you
may find that you can never get your self in a position to see the whole. Ruskin refers to the bounding
line and by that he seems to mean an unfettered continuation of an edge, or seam or horizon that the
eye will follow. In a Greek temple it is the line of the frieze. If you disrupt that line, you take away from
continuity and our ability to take in the mass as a whole.

Beauty – Here John Ruskin refers to skin and ornamentation. He draws heavily on nature, because
nature is our school master for beauty. Therefore art in our buildings should be imitative of the forms
and lines and shapes we see in nature. If a column seems beautiful it is because we see them all around
us in the stems of plants. If a pointed arch is pleasing to the eye it is because that shape was first
pleasing as the shape of a leaf. He also castigates some ornamentation that is not imitative of nature,
such as the Greek Key, a running spiral design common in some Greek architecture.

Life – This has less to do with the building as it is, but rather the building as it was formed. Building
should be made with human hands, and by this he means skilled human hands, masons and carvers and
carpenters. The life of the builder must be in the building. Those who build their own houses can relate
to this. Ruskin was against the mass production of buildings and any innovation that decreased the skill
content of the buildings.

Memory – Buildings (and houses) should reflect the culture and what went on before. They in turn will
inform the culture that follows. John Ruskin was not a big fan of innovative disruption. Even gradual
change is something to be distrusted. In some ways he was the ultimate cultural conservative.
In a later book, The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin derides classical architecture as “Pagan in its origin,
proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make
plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in
which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified.”
He gave intellectual justification to those who were looking for alternatives to classicism. He offered
them Gothic in its stead. Many architects did delve into the Gothic Revival because of his inspiration, but
others took a different route.

While many architects have claimed inspiration by John Ruskin,

The modernists often claimed the lamp of Truth as one of their

The lamp of Life is all but forgotten. John Ruskin valued the contribution of the individual artist and
craftsmen. There is little in the way of current building activity, whether modern or traditional, that can
be said to draw value from the contribution of its craftsmen. Mass production has won the day.

Power is a lamp that is still burning strong. Skyscrapers are monumental and their mass and shape
define them. The best of the postmodern buildings are sculpture writ large.
What is lacking is the lamp of Beauty. The buildings leave an impression from a distance, their size can
overwhelm you, even from inside, but it’s all texture and shape. The minimal detail is inspired by
machinery and technology. Nature has been abandoned. You might take exception to the idea that the
lamp of Beauty is not valued, but I am applying the term as Ruskin seems to apply it in his book. The
beauty that the modern architect offers is distinctly different from what Ruskin espoused.

So why am I claiming Ruskin’s Philosophy as influential in the world of architecture? I will claim two
reasons. One, the architects themselves claim this. Two, Ruskin provided a rational for rejecting
classicism. He wasn’t the first nor the last, but his was the most widely read and quoted.

As we take a look at the modernists, and their philosophy, Ruskin is the first step away from the values
of the past and towards the brave new world that they promised.