The Oxford University Museum of Natural History
The Oxford Museum presents itself as physical evidence of Ruskin’s work in the gothic revival. Augustus Pugin’s manifesto, Contrast, began the Gothic Revival by mixing romantic and pragmatic characteristics to better society by bettering its cities, but it was Ruskin’s Gothic interpretation that ushering the connection of life and spirituality from builders to the building to society. Ruskin spoke at the University of Oxford, that ‘the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues’.
Time has led his theology standpoint to the pressing question of the integrities of architecture and its moral considerations. How are parties involved in the applications made during the process for raising an edifice? Particularly, is the architect, construction worker (workingman) and artist equally enabled, as would future inhibitors of the building? This notion triggers the awareness that architecture is a reflection of our collective history which we must interrelate into our present landscape. Ruskin could not have predicted the commissioning and construction of modern buildings not for the sake of people, but by impersonal organisations. Or today’s aesthetic and symbolic issues as a subcategory of innovative structural and programmatic arguments –representation of the human spirit removed. So in turn, can we make our buildings a memory of our society that can reform the public taste, let alone public morals?
In closing, Ruskin presents ethical aesthetic applications to address this. Firstly, for the architect to remember the origins of nature, and its part played as a universal harmony beyond the marketplace. For the addition of the workingman’s happiness to freely express creatively bringing higher value and vitalism. For the artist to practise its abstract power in meditating materials and technology to encourage sublimity. He goes past the boundary of style and into acknowledging the life and spirit of the beauty in architecture. Not only does the Museum exemplify these applications, but it also reveals innovative successes of machine-use and the empowerment workingman applicable today. How can we evoke emotion in one’s spirit, while carrying the awareness of the danger of prizing technology and not avoiding technical and material progressions? Ruskin’s ethical aesthetic applications seek to serve human ends and not to simply contain man.
