Ruskin: Modern Manufacture & Design, The Stones of Venice

John Ruskin

“Modern Manufacture & Design”“Definitions of Greatness in Art”The Stones of Venice (excerpt)

CCR 711 ::: 10/17/13

Friday, October 18, 13

Jana:I can see this moving toward the arts and crafts lifestyle movement, or a return to nature or the countryside away from city factories, convention, and mechanization, but what does this mean to making? What does this mean to the craftsman/worksman? The form and function and decoration of objects? Who got to make art as craft and by what means? (art seems positioned as hobby in Ruskin) Was the arts and crafts movement of the time always positioned as such a binary? (again, I think of the time: industrialization in the process of becoming industrialized.) Also, why Gothic architecture?

Situating Ruskin (broadly)

(1819-1900)

post-Enlightenment

1642-1727

1660 - present

Josiah Wedgwood

1730 - 1795

chemical processes

Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent

Modern Factory Manufacturing

Bottle ovens, Etruria

Shipping and distribution via canal at Etruria

modernized accounting practiceshuman resource management

Victorian Design

nation as workshop

Modern Manufacture and Design

industrial landscapeand invention

To men surrounded by the depressing and monotonous circumstances of English manufacturing life, depend upon it, design is simply impossible. This is the most distinct of all the experiences I have had in dealing with the modern workman. He is intelligent and ingenious in the highest degree-subtle in touch and keen insight: but he is, generally speaking, wholly destitute of designing power. And if you want to give him the power, you must give him the materials, and put him in the circumstances for it. Design is not the offspring of idle fancy: it is the studied result of accumulative observation and delightful habit. ...

Without observation and experience, no design--and all the lecturings, and teachings, and prizes, and principles of art, in the world, are of no use, so long as you don’t surround your men with happy influences and beautiful things. It is impossible for them to have right ideas about colour, unless they see the lovely colours of nature unspoiled; impossible for them to supply beautiful incident and action in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the world about them....

Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still be spurious, vulgar, and valueless. (“Modern Manufacture and Design”)

In manufacture: we require work substantial rather than rich in make; and refined, rather than splendid in design. Your stuffs need not be such as would catch the eye of a duchess; but they should be such as may at once serve the need, and refine the taste, of a cottager. ... It should be one of the first objects of all manufacturers to produce stuffs not only beautiful and quaint in design, but also adapted for every-day service, and ecorous in humble and secluded life. And you must remember always that your business, as manufacturers, is to form the market, as much as to supply it.

craftsman as author

You all should be, in a certain sense, authors: you must, indeed, first catch the public eye, as an author must the public ear; but once gain your audience, or observance, and as it is in the writer’s power thenceforward to publish what will educate as it amuses--so it is in yours to publish what will educate as it adorns.

Why the Gothic?Why masons?

Without masonry,there is no Gothic.

Characteristics of the builder

• Savageness/Rudeness

• Love of Change

• Love of Nature

• Disturbed Imagination

• Obstinacy

• Generosity

Rudeness as characteristic

Perfection as enslavement

If, as in Gothic work, there is perpetual change both in design and execution, the workman must have been altogether set free. (Stones of Venice 142)

architecture as reading

business and invention

Ruskin: Modern Manufacture & Design, The Stones of Venice

Technology

Transcript of Ruskin: Modern Manufacture & Design, The Stones of Venice

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