CONSTRUCTING ETHICS AND THE ETHICS OF
CONSTRUCTION:
John Ruskin and the Humanity of the Builder
by John Matteson
In the grandeur of this cathedral, the act of seeing transforms
from a necessity to a luxury. There is no aspect of the structure
that fails to surprise and astonish the eye. I am attracted to the
word “surprise” because it seems to me that much of the beauty
of St. John the Divine lies in its unpredictability and its almost
chaotic inclusiveness. In one space one finds a Poets’ Corner;
another wall is dedicated to correspondence from prisoners. Stained
glass windows not only portray the Passion and the Resurrection but
also commemorate the sinking of the Titanic and celebrate the
glories of ice hockey. The cathedral is both an architectural marvel
and a shrine to human experience, in both its lowliest and its most
exalted. Indeed, it seems that the greatness of this cathedral is
that it is a vast metaphor for humanity: diverse but striving toward
harmony, grand but imperfect, and always a work in progress.
It is appropriate that our conference on ethics in architecture
takes place in this building, which is in itself a lesson in human
nature and morality. But as we look around us at this Gothic
splendor, we may also see in it questions that we must try to
answer. Just what are the moral obligations of the architect? To
whom are they owed? Can and should the ethical lessons of a Gothic
cathedral be adapted to other, seemingly dissimilar building
projects? Are the ethics of architecture finally reconcilable with
the demands of a free-market economy? Because I happen to be an
English professor instead of an architect, I find it most natural to
answer these questions by appealing to literature.
Among the writers in the literary canon who thought seriously
about architecture, probably the one most likely to help us answer
these questions is John Ruskin, an art critic of the Victorian era.
Ruskin’s aesthetic sense continually pressed him to consider how
the experiences of art and architecture impress themselves upon
individuals and their cultures. When we think about the nexus
between ethics and architecture, I suspect that many of us think
first, as a matter of reflex, of the obligations owed by the
architect to the persons who will use the building. In other words,
we tend to think principally in terms of the relationship between
producer and consumer, and we assume this to be the most significant
relationship in any activity related to commerce. Our ethics
unconsciously orient themselves around the relationship between
supply and demand.
Ruskin is valuable to us because he did not share these
assumptions. He rejected the idea that buying and selling lay at the
heart of the ethics of architecture. He focused not on production
for the purpose of consumption, but on the moral effect of the
production upon the producer. He required above all that the
process of building should, in all ways possible, enlist the
emotion, the imagination, and the intellect of the laborer. Ruskin
chose this approach because his principal frames of reference were
not the economics or even the physical realities of building, but
rather the sensibilities of religion and visual aesthetics. Although
he wrote two significant books on architecture, The Seven Lamps
of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin was
not an architect, nor, as he himself admitted, did he think like
one. In his autobiography, he conceded, “I never could have built
or carved anything, because I was without power of design.”1Really,
it is hard to imagine another writer who wrote so much and so
eloquently about architecture who had so limited an appreciation for
the medium per se. In his preface to the second edition of The
Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin declared his belief that the
only two fine arts possible to the human race were sculpture and
painting. By contrast, what we call architecture was “only the
association of these in noble masses, or the placing them in fit
places.” He went so far as to proclaim that “the architect who
[is] not a sculptor or a painter, [is] nothing better than a
frame-maker on a large scale.”2 To his
discredit, Ruskin lacked the ability, essential to a good builder,
to observe the beauty and value that can exist in structure itself.
What he did possess, and possess abundantly, was the ability to see
from the standpoints of an artist and a religious ethicist. I have
just said “artist” and “ethicist” as if they describe two
distinct ways of seeing. As I shall explain, however, art and ethics
were inseparable for Ruskin, for artistic expression appeared to him
to be an essential path to human salvation.
Ruskin was born into a deeply religious family. He remembered in
later years how, from the age of seven, his mother imposed upon him
the daily task of reading the Bible aloud. They would begin with the
first verse of Genesis and, over a period of months, slog through to
the last line of Revelations. As soon as they were done, they
started again at the beginning. This Sisyphean labor did not cease
until Ruskin was fourteen. With her mechanical, unrelenting, prison
warden’s approach to the Scripture, Ruskin’s mother impressed
upon her son the primary, vital importance of seeking deliverance
from evil. But at the same time, she inadvertently estranged him
from the orthodox practice of religion. Ruskin did not love his
parents, and, he wrote, “Still less did I love God; not that I had
any quarrel with Him, or fear of Him; but simply found what people
told me was His service, disagreeable; and what people told me was
His book, not entertaining.”3 As a young adult, Ruskin
tried to come back to religion. He was surprised, however, to
discover that his independent investigations of the Bible had
produced in him “nothing but darkness and doubt.” What remained
of his traditional beliefs diminished as the bombshell of
evolutionary theory exploded over Victorian culture. Ruskin lamented
in 1851 that his faith was “being beaten into mere gold leaf. . .
.If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very
well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the
end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”4
How, then, if not through the God of the Scriptures, were people
to save themselves? Evidently, through more earthly avenues: partly
through the inspiring influence of nature but also, essentially and
inescapably, through the ennobling agency of their work. However,
not just any work would do. Ruskin believed that there were two
kinds of work. The first, lamentably the much more common, was
monotonous, imitative, and unoriginal. It deadened and constricted
the mind and the soul. Ah, but the other! Work that engaged the
worker in an original striving, work that brought into the world a
gleaming reflection of the inner spirit; that not only created an
artifact, but improved the heart and the hands that created it,—that
was work by which one could become part of the mystical splendor of
life. This second kind of work was not just a means of making a
living; it was the quintessential act of living itself. The fate of
one’s soul, Ruskin believed, might well depend upon the kind of
work the person was given to do. Give the worker a task that
requires no investment of the mind and spirit, and you consign her
or him to living perdition. Give a worker the chance not merely to
manufacture or assemble, but actually to create, and you lay open
the road to a life of redemptive beauty. To those whom the scripture
could not preserve, the experience of true artistic craftsmanship
might yet give salvation.
Ruskin most famously advanced this proposition in an essay
titled, “The Nature of Gothic.” Appearing at the precise
midpoint of the second volume of the three-volume work, The
Stones of Venice, “The Nature of Gothic” lies both
physically and morally at the heart of that study. Ruskin’s
purpose in The Stones of Venice as a whole was ethical. By
observing the architecture of the city, he meant to illustrate the
relation of the decline of Venice’s sense of taste and proportion
to an allegedly parallel devolution in her public morals. The
Stones of Venice, in a larger sense, illustrates how the choice
of an architectural idiom can reflect and, in turn, help to
determine the values of a citizenry. Ruskin’s more concentrated
objective in “The Nature of Gothic” was two-fold: first to
explain the power of work either to elevate or degrade the
architectural worker and, second, to advance an intriguing paradox—that
to demand technical perfection in an architectural project was not
to ennoble the worker but to reduce the worker to a state of
slavery.
Ruskin reasoned as follows. Perfect workmanship does not arise
from a natural state of things. The moment the average human being
sets out to create, she passes from the rarefied realm of the ideal
into the inevitability of flaw and mistake. We are imperfect beings,
and the things we make and build are naturally inscribed with
eccentricity and error. Because these errors are what make us
individuals, so-called “perfect” work often strikes us as cold
and impersonal. In its aversion to error, such work strains to
disavow its human origins. Worse still, the demand for perfection
reduces the worker to an unthinking slave. Ruskin writes to the
architects of the world, as well as to all others who purchase or
supervise creative labor when he declares, “You are put to a stern
choice. . . .You must either make a tool of the creature, or a
man of him. You cannot make both. Men are not intended to work with
the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their
actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their
fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike
curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.”5
It was the triumph of Gothic, Ruskin claimed, that it did not
insist on technical precision. Indeed, Gothic, as a physical
manifestation of Christian ideals, “recognized, in small things as
well as great, the individual value of every soul.
But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its
imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgement of
unworthiness.”6 Gothic architecture responded to a
fundamentally Christian injunction: “Do what you can, and confess
frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be
shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear
of shame.”7 Thus the Gothic architect took his builder
as he found him, knowing that the execution of the work would be
fitful and irregular, but knowing too, that this irregularity was a
sign of life, since nothing that lives can be precisely perfect.
Ruskin summarized his point succinctly: “All things are literally
better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections that have
been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort,
and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”8
But Ruskin did not see this law of mercy being acted out around
him. He saw it least of all in his native England, which
congratulated itself because the slightest details of its
manufactures were so regular and uniform. In the Victorian obsession
with exactitude and perfection, and in the division of labor that
made the goals of that obsession realizable, Ruskin saw the
figurative dismemberment of the human being:
We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great
civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a
false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided;
but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men— broken into
small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of
intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a
nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head
of a nail. . . .[In] all our manufacturing cities. . .we manufacture
everything. . .except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel,
and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen,
to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our
estimate of advantages.9
Ruskin’s lament was quintessentially one of the industrial age.
In his protest against standardization and routinized mass
production, he was railing against exploitation and alienation
before such terms had joined the arsenal of popular Marxist
discourse. This is not to say, however, that Ruskin was some form of
proto-Marxist. His outlook was fundamentally more humanistic than
economic, and, as we have seen, he sought his solutions in justice
and mercy, not in prophecies of violent revolution. He appealed
above all to a common sense of decency; he supposed that consumers
would be willing to sacrifice their enjoyment of a perfect product
in order to make possible the pleasure that is felt when people
discover, test, and gradually expand the limits of their personal
genius.
But Ruskin, in all his sentimental glory, in his rhapsodic paeans
to an aestheticized Christian fellowship, cries out for a reality
check. What, finally, does he have to tell us about architecture,
and how, if at all, are his prescriptions of effort and mercy to be
realized in a competitive marketplace? Moreover, to what purpose are
we to consider his praise of Gothic form? Let us concede that the
Gothic style, with its expressions of shattered majesty and
imperfect but earnest striving, is an ideal choice for an avowedly
religious building like a cathedral. Even so, it would be foolish to
argue that all other kinds of structures must serve the identical
purpose of reminding the viewer of God’s grandeur. Furthermore,
one cannot escape the fact that Ruskin, who was a successful critic
of painting long before he began to acknowledge architecture, always
thought of buildings as surfaces to be looked at, rather than
functional three-dimensional spaces in which to carry on the
business of life. His work on architecture is concerned primarily
with ornamentation; he does not explain how one is supposed to
escape the tyranny of perfection when pouring a foundation or sawing
a two-by-four. Precision, moreover, is more essential to
architecture than to other visual arts. Refining the construction
worker’s soul through imperfect labor seems unimportant if it
means the wiring is not up to code and the roof leaks. Perhaps most
damaging to Ruskin’s argument are two other points. First, he
neglects the possibility that routine, unoriginal work, done
professionally, may yield its own species of pleasure. Forgotten,
too, is the fact that standardized labor, even if not highly
pleasurable in itself, takes less time than individualized, creative
work; a builder who does not find deep satisfaction on the job may,
by dint of speedier production methods, nevertheless have more time
to seek that satisfaction on a golf course or a trout stream. Then
again, the very core of Ruskin’s task is to inquire into the
proper relation between work and enjoyment: should we be content to
view work merely as the means by which we purchase pleasure, or
should work in itself be an indispensable source of joy? As usual,
Ruskin draws a lesson from scripture. He writes:
It may be proved, with much certainty, that God intends no man to
live in this world without working: but it seems to me no less
evident that He intends every man to be happy in his work. It is
written, “in the sweat of thy brow,” but it was never written,
“in the breaking of thine heart,” thou shalt eat bread.10
Ruskin’s vision of a mode of architectural production geared
toward the creative fulfillment and spiritual deliverance of the
worker was in large part unattainable even when he first asserted
it. At the very time he was writing The Stones of Venice,
London was witnessing the erection of the famed Crystal Palace, a
structure whose steel, glass, and prefabricated components heralded
a revolution. If Ruskin’s ideas were already destined for
quaintness in the 1850s, it is easy in 2002 to regard them as
practically absurd. Since Ruskin’s time, populations have grown
and economic systems have expanded with once unimaginable speed.
Construction in our time has to be fast. It must be efficient. It
must avoid unnecessary expense. If Ruskin foresaw the further
mechanization of physical labor, he was at least spared the sadness
of seeing how far that mechanization would eventually extend. Ruskin
also did not anticipate that the alienation that he saw as poisoning
the life of the worker might someday encompass not only the process
of construction, but also those of conception and design. He could
never have imagined on-line catalogs of design components or the
idea that an architect might one day resolve decisions of
ornamentation, not with painstaking manual drawing or
model-building, but with the click of a mouse. Neither could he have
expected that modern buildings would often be commissioned and
designed, not by individuals at all, but by impersonal
organizations. It would have been strange, indeed, for Ruskin to
discover the myriad ways in which architecture could divorce itself
from the simple human acts of drawing and carving.
And yet, before we dismiss Ruskin’s ideas about the nature of
Gothic as entirely obsolete, we should pause to consider that, when
we gathered today to discuss architecture as an ethical pursuit, we
chose to congregate in the very structure in all of Manhattan that
has striven most mightily to realize Ruskin’s ideals. When, in
1972, after a thirty-year hiatus in construction, the dean of St.
John the Divine announced that construction would begin again, he
announced that “the stonework [would] be done by our own
unemployed and underemployed neighbors. We will revive the art of
stonecraft.”11 The spirit of the new construction was
profoundly Ruskinian: it entrusted a sacred Gothic edifice to hands
that would begin the project raw and untutored, in expectation that,
as the structure grew and took shape, so, too, would the skills and
souls of the workers. That the cathedral actually did become a
literal synthesis of stonecutting and soul-making, an exemplar of
Ruskin’s demand that the work must affirm the passion of the
worker, seems to be confirmed in the words of Simon Verity, one of
the master carvers employed in the project: To be a carver, you have
to have a passion for it, to love it with all your heart. It’s a
desire to create order out of chaos, to seek harmonies.12
Surely, Ruskin would have applauded this method of construction,
a combination, someone has said, of outreach and up-reach. And yet
his applause might have been tempered by the knowledge of how deeply
the impersonality of technology and profit had insinuated themselves
into the building of the cathedral. The following is from a recent
study of St. John the Divine:
[The construction of the cathedral] has matured into an eminently
practical operation in which. . .the tools of the trade include
instruments unprecedented in the history of stonework. Digital
cameras, robotic saws and routers, and a linear motion table reduce
the monotony of repetitive work and greatly accelerate production. .
. .Meanwhile, a separate profit-making, tax-paying entity. . .was
incorporated in 1989. . . .Stone cutters whose progress was
slow-paced and confined to elemental work in earlier years can now
program machines to do much of the fabrication. . . .Construction
and restoration becomes [sic.] more accurate and economical as
twenty-first-century technology is applied to the thirteenth-
century goal.13
Robotic saws. Profit making. Programmable machines. Accuracy and
economy. Even in this most Ruskinian of present-day building
projects, the inevitabilities of the machine and the marketplace
implacably penetrate. None of us, I think is prepared to deny the
utility, even the necessity of these intrusions. And yet, if John
Ruskin were to walk these halls with us today, would he be more
likely to murmur, “We are surrounded by a miracle,” or, “We
stand within a compromise”?
Ruskin’s career was never the same after The Stones of
Venice, and the essay “The Nature of Gothic” marked perhaps
the decisive transitional moment. Before he wrote it, Ruskin had
seen himself principally as a critic of visual arts. Thereafter, he
re-invented himself as a critic of society, dedicated above all to
exposing the excesses of materialism and exploitation. That the
alienation of the architectural worker served as the point at which
this transition occurred was no accident, for it shows Ruskin’s
realization that the values of a society are inseparable from the
art it produces. Architecture was becoming corrupt, he believed,
through no fault of its own. It was inevitably responding to the
culture that produced it. And since architecture is the most
inescapable of visual arts, it is the most ubiquitous artistic
barometer of cultural malaise. The most magnificent building, Ruskin
implied, was only a grotesque anomaly if the society that encircled
it was vulgar and corrupt. Listen to his description of the city he
beheld from the steps of St. Mark’s in Venice:
Round the whole square
in front of the church there is an almost continuous line of cafés,
where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read
empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the
time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes,—the
march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round
them,—a crowd, which, if it had its will, would stiletto every
soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all
day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and
listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded
children,—every heavy glance of their young eyes full of
desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with
cursing,—gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour,
clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the
church porch. And the images of Christ and His Angels look down upon
it continually.14
The architecture was sublime; the human activity around it was an
obscene mockery. What good was the building if it could not
transform the debauched children who cast lots on its very steps?
After The Stones of Venice, it was no longer enough for
Ruskin to criticize art. It was hierarchies of human beings, not
structures of wood and stone, that begged most loudly for his
attention.
However, I would argue that we would err frightfully if we were
to accept Ruskin’s fatalistic assumption that architecture can
only follow where the rest of society leads it. While it may rarely
lie within the power of a single architect to reform the public
taste, let alone public morals, it would be sad indeed to suppose
that, upon entering a profession, one at once must discard higher
obligations in the names of perfection, efficiency, and the bottom
line. Ruskin’s contributions to the philosophy of architecture
were by no means practical, but it is curiously in their very
impracticality that they retain value. His greatest gift to us is
that he still challenges us to look outside of the marketplace when
making architectural choices. In Ruskin, ethics and aesthetics may
be said truly to merge. As the final criterion of architecture,
Ruskin proposed happiness—the happiness of the worker certainly,
but also the power of physical, manmade mass to speak pleasurably to
the soul. If we cannot build always with this happiness as our
principal guide, it is still worthwhile to open Ruskin on occasion,
if only to remember what this kind of happiness is.
Notes
1. John Ruskin, Praeterita, (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949).
108.
2. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture(London: Routledge,
n.d.), xvi–xvii.
3. Ruskin, Praeterita, 35.
4. John Ruskin, quoted in John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A
Portrait of John Ruskin’s Genius(New York: Columbia UP, 1980), 30.
5. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice(Boston: Estes and Lauriat,
1897), II, 162.
6. Ibid., 160.
7. Ibid., 160.
8. Ibid., 172.
9. Ibid., 165–66.
10. John Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” The Complete Works of John
Ruskin(New York: Bryan, Taylor & Co., 1894), XV, 237.
11. Howard E. Quirk, The Living Cathedral: St. John the Divine, (New
York: Crossroad Books, 1993), 24.
12. George Ancona, Cutters, Carvers, & the Cathedral(New York:
Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1995), n.p.
13. Quirk, 24–25.
14. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, II, 72.
This essay was first presented at the “Ethics and
Architecture” conference on April 6, 2002, at the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine in New York City co-sponsored by CrossCurrents.
