characteristic, is an extension of savageness into the realm of imagination. The fifth, rigidity shows Ruskin’s acute interest for the lines of force of nature. And the last one, “redundancy” relates to “an accumulation of ornament” that expresses «a profound sympathy with the fullness and wealth of the material universe». All six dramatically building one argument on top of the other, directly oppose the architectures of classicism Ruskin so despises. According to Ruskin, the Gothic inspiration was especially noticeable in its continuity, as these elements bore the trace of the intimate association between the hand and mind, «they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone, a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure». In another word, it lays in the hands of craftsman. Though the Gothic was never an era without architects, there were master masons travelled from one project to another who no longer concerned themselves with personally carving the stone but with drawing it. However, these drawings were not prescriptive, leaving ambiguity, incompleteness even imprecision embodied in the drawings, and this allowed a freedom of craftsmen interpretation exists. Ruskin then abruptly introduces the 19th century labor into his argument, which renders his take on Gothic architecture highly operative. The labor is what he called “our labor”. He compared English workman to Venetian ones, calling the former «a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges», while the later «invented a new design for every glass that he made». This status is built upon two mistaken suppositions, «the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, the manual labor is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect». For him, the separation between design intent and design realization is but one example of the division of labor. In the stage of the modernization and industrialization process, driven by capitalist mode of production, automated or other more generalized forms of mechanized production gradually eliminated the relevance of craft and reduced the work to a set of prescribed operations, often imagined by high-level operators at the expense of the low-level agents, by removing any benefit of engaging in such practices. Because of this discontinuity, labor became the “degradation of work.” Ruskin became concerned by this lack of spirituality of construction of his time, as opposed to the genuine inspiration of the Gothic. This led to the revival of craftsmanship championed by John Ruskin, William Morris, et al. Their Arts and Crafts movement sought the rejection of the processes and aspirations of industrialization, which they argued to be socially and morally caustic. Contrary to the division of labor, Ruskin and his followers proposed a seamless continuity between designing and making as a politically progressive approach. This represents the fusion of aesthetic and social concerns in Ruskin’s writing, he needed Gothic to save his era from the division of labor, he needed the craftsmanship to unify design and making again. His purpose in using gothic for social criticism can be explained.
pagina a fronte Fig. 1 J. Ruskin, Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy, from The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849.
Digital Craftsmanship: A Neo-Ruskinian Perspective? We often understand “digital” as meaning “electronically computed”, but after all, the word “digital” stems from latin digitus (“finger”) and its meaning, besides “being related to numbers” is also “performed with a finger”. This naturally evokes Ruskin’s description of the work of craftsmen as “the art of the thinking hand.” Meanwhile, the rise of digital architecture especially digital fabrication leads to the idea of the design-
285