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 practices
human resource management


Victorian Design


nation as workshop


Modern Manufacture
and Design


industrial landscape
and 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.


•
•
•
•
•
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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


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