University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Building texts + reading fabrics: Metaphor, memory, and material in John Ruskin’s ""Stones of Venice"""

Kite, Stephen

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89741

Description

Title
"Building texts + reading fabrics: Metaphor, memory, and material in John Ruskin’s ""Stones of Venice"""
Author(s)
Kite, Stephen
Issue Date
2012
Keyword(s)
  • Information and Space
  • Spatial Analogies
  • Spatial Metaphors
  • Memory
Abstract
We cannot remember without [architecture], declares John Ruskin (1819–1900) in “The Lamp of Memory” of his The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) (Cook and Wedderburn, 1904, vol. 8, p. 224).1 For Ruskin, the city is a place of collective memory, a space where buildings are analogized as texts—“the criticism of the building is to be conducted precisely on the same principles as that of a book,” he contends (Works, 10: 269). In the evangelical tradition of Ruskin’s upbringing, this interpretation of architecture is a kind of lectio divina; a great building is a sacred palimpsest for those who read the fabric with patience and insight. Equally, a text such as the three volumes of his Stones of Venice is endowed with a tectonic in counterform to the city it depicts. Thus, the first volume is constructed from quarry to cornice; Ruskin demands his readers to roll up their sleeves, gives them “stones, and bricks, and straw, chisels and trowels, and the ground, and then asks [them] to build” (Works, 9: 73). In exploring these analogous spaces of text and architecture, this research operates within the empirical and documentary arena of Ruskinian interpretation, working with the primary notebooks, worksheets, and diaries from which the Stones of Venice was constructed. It examines the reciprocity between Ruskin’s multiple readings of the urban fabric, the erection of the manuscript of Stones, and the playing out of his intimate physical knowledge of the city in themes of metaphor, memory and material.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89741
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2012.0040
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 61 (2) Fall 2012: Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors PRIMARY
Library Trends 61 (2) Fall 2012: Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors. Edited by Wouter Van Acker and Pieter Uyttenhove