Seven Lamps of Architecture

The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Title page of the first edition
Author	John Ruskin
Illustrator	John Ruskin
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	Architecture
Genre	Non-fiction
Publisher	Smith, Elder & Co.
Publication date	May 1849
Media type	Print
Pages	205 pp.
Followed by	The Stones of Venice

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.

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:

Writing within the essentially British tradition of the associational values that inform aesthetic appreciation, Ruskin argued from a moral stance with polemic tone, that the technical innovations of architecture since the Renaissance and particularly the Industrial Revolution, had subsumed its spiritual content and sapped its vitality. He also argued that no new style was needed to redress this problem, as the appropriate styles already existed. The 'truest' architecture was therefore, the older Gothic of medieval cathedrals and Venice. The essay sketched out the principles which Ruskin later expounded upon in the three-volume The Stones of Venice published between 1851 and 1853. Practically, he suggested an 'honest' architecture with no veneers, finishes, hidden support nor machined mouldings and that beauty must be derived from nature and crafted by man.