Timothy Brittain-Catlin on John Ruskin and the Fabric of Architecture

摘要

Critics, like buildings, are revisited all the time. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin is not generally associated with the latest developments in surfact architecture, and yet here he is now. A person with passionate an often contradictory views, he has never been an easy figure. What is one to do with all this stuff about life and love and flowers when sitting down to design a building? One might respond like Norman Shaw: 'Every word I believe to be fallacious, but I read it with pleasure and lay it down with regret." Yet in all those moving, shaking, blinking, changing facades we have seen in the past few years there is more than a touch of the maniacal old man, whose death in 1900 was greeted with cries of relief by London artists.2