Constructing ethics and the ethics of construction: John Ruskin and the humanity of the builder

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 pass ion of the worker, seems to be confirmed in the words of Simon Verity, one of the master carvers employed in the project:

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:

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)

[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-clay 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: