page_title: The Seven Lamps of Architecture
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: The Seven Lamps of Architecture / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Interior of All Saints church, Margaret Street. The image was taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1.
context_page_description: 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. 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 and it was well under way in practice. Ruskin offered little new to the debate, but the book helped to capture and summarise the thoughts of the movement. 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.
context_section_description: Ruskin had made his debut as a critic of architecture with The Poetry of Architecture (1839), an essay in the picturesque that he later rejected, The Seven Lamps were still tentative steps for Ruskin's architectural criticism and offered a moral creed for architects. He later went on to disclaim the essay as a 'wretched rant'.
  The first effect of the book was almost immediate in the influence it had upon William Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street Church. Politician Alexander Beresford Hope and architect Butterfield had agreed upon the general details just a month after Ruskin's book was published and by August they had revised their plans to encapsulate the principles it espoused. 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. In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson's expectations of a new, authentic American style had prepared the ground: Ruskin's Seven Lamps were quickly assimilated into the aesthetics of Transcendentalism.
  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. 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.
caption: All Saints, Margaret Street by Beresford-Hope and Butterfield was immediately influenced by Ruskin's essay, particularly in its structural use of brick, rather than for surface decoration
exif: {}