The Freshest Writer on Design Was Born 200 Years Ago
Five lessons every designer can learn from the great 19th-century critic John Ruskin
By Brian Millar
Once upon a time, a young lawyer from India got on a train in England and opened a book to while away the journey. By the time he pulled in to his destination, that book had inspired him to fight for Indian independence. “This great book of Ruskin… made me transform my life,” said Mahatma Gandhi. Ruskin, a reclusive, magnificently bearded Victorian writer changed design and art forever, kicked off socialism and pretty much invented the environmental movement. As we enter an age where designers and architects are, as they were in Ruskin’s era, increasingly at the beck and call of immensely powerful barons of commerce, it’s worth revisiting some of the lessons Ruskin taught the thinkers and makers of the late 19th century. Perhaps they’ll change your life too.
Design is moral
Ugly buildings and ugly objects were, Ruskin wrote, not just an aesthetic problem. They were a symptom of a ruling class that did not care about its own people. He contrasted the ugly mill towns of the north of England with the buildings of Venice. Venice had been created to bring beauty into all its inhabitants’ lives; Victorian captains of…
