… Who clipped the lion’s wings
And flea’d his rump and pared his claws?
Thought Burbank, meditating on
Time’s ruins, and the seven laws
(ANQ, 1995).
The world of architecture is full of old and new methods of ornamenting the buildings. The many-faceted nature of architecture is conditioned by the fact that like every kind of art it has its own history, development, theoretical and practical base. Too many people tried to express the trends of society preferences incorporating the passion and desire to follow the fashionable mainstreams of this or that epoch. The talent of an architect touches upon the ability to think following the spatially imaginative type of human reasoning.
John Ruskin is a well-known philosopher and architect of the Victorian Era who implemented a very interesting and picturesque vision of architectural trends in the book “The Seven Lamps of Architecture”. In this book, the author tries to point out the idea of major principles in architecture. These principles fall into seven (as it is outlined in the book title) ones: Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. Ruskin compares these statements with lamps whose main aim is to enlighten society, so here is one of his philosophical hints. The main idea of the book expresses the notion that architecture specifically is determined and relevant to the nation which created it or the city where the fruits of architectural design are situated. Ruskin separates in his book the concept of architecture from that of an ordinary building. “The seven lamps” seem to be like seven reminders inserted in forms and types of architectural art. All the types of Ruskin’s “lamps” serve to protect the information, prescription and significance of the architected buildings. For example, in “The Lamp of Memory,” he supposes the relationship between the historical background of a building and the building itself. He concludes that restoration “is a lie from beginning to end” because the original form is disfigured. That was caused by his life slogan which noted: “go to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing and selecting nothing.” The person of John Ruskin becomes then wide to define. He adored most of all the age of the building being assured that this feature actually describes the time when the building was made along with the cultural and traditional sides of people living at that time.
For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity (Ruskin, p. 186).
Returning to the “lamps” of Ruskin it is needless to say that the author of the book intends people to have a look at the prescription which architecture embodies. The artifacts of different streams through the history of this art can better explain the details of people’s searching and realizing of new methods in the art. From the aesthetic point of view, the author claims that “we cannot remember without architecture” (The Architectural Review, 1996). The religious background and his strict bringing-up maintained the ideas which he applies to the architecture. He compares “lamp” with “word” and “law”. For him, the material world of existence is a manifestation of the spiritual world. Ruskin did not look at the masterpieces of architecture without invoking the spiritual background of an artist and the Invisible Hand which controlled the process. Of course, Ruskin added to these motives a piece of rationality.
Ruskin’s concern with memory, with the memorial and monumental, was complex. He saw architecture as a text of cumulative history. He believed that architecture could convey information metaphorically, through its surface decoration, and he likened buildings to books – he referred to St Mark’s as ‘a vast illuminated missal’ (The Architectural Review, 1996).
The world of Ruskin’s vision is apprehensible in the principles which were of revolutionary character for mankind in order to support the further mainstreams in architecture. For example, the British modernistic stream of the late twentieth century.
Looking at the building of McCormick Tribune Campus Center in the Illinois Institute of Technology designed by Rem Koolhaas one cannot but admire its magnificent appearance. In fact, the campus was first designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who headed the architectural program of IIT in 1938. The stream in which he preferred designing the campus was German Bauhaus. The main feature of this building is the circuit of railway which goes through the one-storey building. As it is known, the campus contains two main parts of its structure: 10,690 square meters, one-storey building made of glass and metal, and a 161-meter long tube made of stainless steel which cover the main building’s roof and provides damping of noise and vibration provoked by driven through trains. The first part of the building is called to satisfy students’ requirements by including a coffee bar, welcome center, university bookstore, computer room and other high-end conveniences” (Rem Koolhaas, 2003). High-tech design is portrayed with images of Mies on the glass wall of the building’s entrance and other retro images expressed in snapshots along the corridors of campus. The intention to follow some future insights is present in the building’s design. “The encircled track-“The Tube”-also becomes a crucial part of the Center’s, and IIT’s, image” (Rem Koolhaas, 2003).
In accordance with the view of Ruskin onto the campus building, it is necessary to note the remarks by Richard McCormack. He explored the experience and the amplification of Ruskin’s approaches about architecture and realized his main motives in depicting “lamps” so that to display the modes which they appear to bring to the society:
The building avoids historical style but is ‘rendered historical’ in the Ruskinian sense. The actual concrete construction is exposed internally in its true character, in the giant portal frames which span longitudinally. But externally, it is ‘encrusted’ – to use another Ruskinian term – with white masonry and dark grey/green courses, joined with stainless-steel bosses, the equivalent of the visible fastenings used in the cladding of Italian buildings, which Ruskin called ‘confessed rivets’ (The Architectural Review, 1996).
So, the point is that the above-mentioned author would prefer the idea of Koolhaas to choose such a decision. The details of the campus as well as the historical background of the city Chicago tend to characterize and be similar to Ruskin’s standpoints about the building. First, one should remember that the industrial past and present of Chicago are described in the structure of the campus, for the city is well-known to contribute to the budget of the US by the industrial enterprises and well-developed net of the extension railways. The building actually holds the notion and specialization of the institute, its technological constituent. One of Ruskin’s “lamps” was Truth. The author of the book reproved “the ‘surface deceit’ of plaster lined out like stone. What Ruskin expressly admired was rough-hewn rubble” (Journal of Design History, 1996). If one paid attention to other projects of Koolhaas, he would note that this architect follows the standpoint of Ruskin illuminating the idea of the tunnel made excavated through the possibilities of progress. Another example of Koolhaas’s works is the project for the European Central Bank, Germany, Frankfurt Am Main where the building is like rough curve reminding that one which shows the trend of the currency. About his architectural merit in Chicago Koolhaas once commented: “To proclaim a new beginning, we enclose the section that runs above the Campus Center in an acoustically isolating stainless steel tube, thereby releasing the potential of the no-man’s-land around the Elevated” (Rem Koolhaas, 2003). As the building is the educational establishment, so here another “lamp” within seven comes – Obedience. Here students are taught to hold by the rules in techniques, physics and life on the whole. The “lamb” titled Beauty within the construct of the campus serves to attract people’s attention on the individuality of the building. The list can be followed further.
To conclude, one ought to outline the work of the Dutch architect a man can read the requirements of people living at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The influence of Ruskin helps to evaluate the meaning of The McCormick Tribune Campus Center within his special modes called “lamps”. As Herodotus once stated: All is in a state of flux, nothing is constant, this statement proves the idea of transmutability of trendy determinations in each period of the history of mankind. It is fair, unless the architecture loses its sacred tradition to make the world of human beings more vivid and varicolored.
Works Cited
- Loucks, James F. “Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”.” ANQ 8.1 (1995).
- Maccormac, Richard. “Architecture, Memory and Metaphor.” The Architectural Review 1996.
- MacInnes, Ranald. “Rubblemania’: Ethic and Aesthetic in Scottish Architecture.” Journal of Design History 9.3 (1996)
- John Ruskin. ([1880] 1989). The seven lamps of architecture. New York: Dover Publications. P. 186 Rem Koolhaas “Projects 2003”