The Seven Lamps of Architecture

John Ruskin was one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. In the popular imagination he is best known as a supporter of William Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, or as a failed husband whose failures never ceased to arouse voyeuristic curiosity.
However, he will interest us as an eminent art critic and author of provocative aesthetic and socio-economic theories, whose vision of the moral and social renewal of the world through art, architecture and design has been taken up and developed by advocates of very different positions. Ironically, he was invoked not only by critics of capitalism and lovers of Gothic architecture, but also by avant-gardists who rejected tradition and the belief in the superiority of the new over the inherited. But Ruskin was a cultural pessimist and anti-modernist who, even in the mid-19th century, suspected that the prospects offered by technological progress did not necessarily guarantee a better and happier life.