Hidden Histories | Lasansky

Le Corbusier termed the arrangement at the Certosa “a modern city” and “the solution of the working house community”. The monastery became a model for Le Corbusier’s idea of the architectural promenade, as well as the generative concept for many of his later housing projects including the Immeuble Villas of 1922, the design for a University Quarter of 1923 and the various Unités d’Habitation of the 1950s and 1960s in which an individual and the collective could coexist.

Twentieth-century historians such as Reyner Banham, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bruno Zevi have confined Ruskin’s influence to the theory of restoration and discussions of 19th-century historicism. His role in constructing modernist discourse is not fully appreciated. For the Anglo-American audience familiar with the work of Ruskin decades before those who read it in translation, Ruskin was largely imbedded within discussions of neo-Medieval architecture.

But for young European modernists like Le Corbusier, Ruskin’s ideas were read in a different way. Ruskin’s celebration of humble structures that maintained a sense of “dignity” and “harmonize(d) beautifully with the nobility of the neighboring edifices, or the glory of the surrounding scenery” struck a chord with a generation of architects seeking to find inspiration from simple vernacular structures. Pagano and Daniel criticized Ruskin’s comments for verging on a “romantic adoration of the picturesque”, nonetheless they acknowledged that his apt assessment of the structures’ “dignified simplicity” (made in The Poetry of Architecture) had not been properly noted.

Ruskin’s influence on architects, historians, and critics who came of age during the first decades of the 20th century is clear. Individuals like the Florentine practioners Michellucci, Brizzi, Berardi, and Baroni who were busily photographing the Tuscan landscape took Ruskin’s admonition to draw attention to the rural to heart. Even those like Pagano who were critical of Ruskin’s nostalgic rhetoric still found reason to reiterate his ideas.

Ruskin claimed that his writings were intended to provide an aesthetic education rather than to serve as a guidebook. And so they did. In the case of Piacentini who co-founded the journal Architettura ed arte decorative in 1921, Ruskin validated an interest in culture which encompassed decorative art, anonymous vernacular traditions, and medieval architecture. Piacentini’s journal quotes heavily from Ruskin reinforcing the notion that Ruskin’s texts taught young architects not only what sites to see, but more importantly, how to look. It was Ruskin’s promotion of the “Italian cottage” and various taxonomies that held immediate appeal for the Rationalists.

Ruskin’s thoughts held currency amongst young architects in part because translations of his writings were for the first time readily available, in part because his writings were sympathetic to the goals of the Rationalists, and perhaps most importantly, because his philosophies reso-