John Ruskin and the Golden Stain of Time
Poet, artist, art and architectural critic, social reformer, socialist and Oxford don, John Ruskin (1819 to 1900) was one of those boundless Victorian Renaissance men with a stunning output of work. He is considered by many to have been the most influential writer on the development of Victorian architecture, certainly within the English-speaking world. Part of his writings include his theories of architectural conservation, which have helped shape the course of modern heritage conservation and are still reflected in Canada’s Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places.
" Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end… We have no rightwhatever to touch them (historic buildings). They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their right in them…"
JOHN RUSKIN: 'THE LAMP OF MEMORY' THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE
For Ruskin, the greatest value in ancient buildings lies in their age, with the primary character-defining element, in today’s parlance, as its patina – those natural signs of aging and incremental accretions which root historic places in time and give them a sense of time and place. Ruskin described this character by the wonderful phrase, “the golden stain of time.”
One of the reasons Ruskin loathed restoration is because it destroyed the very value he saw as important – age. Restoration does a great job in making brand-new old buildings. Instead of historic places functioning as time-anchors in communities, layered with the different ages bequeathed by continuous evolutionary uses and patterns, the majority of restorations render the past as spanking new examples of architectural styles as if they were built yesterday. It’s one of the problems when values are narrowly defined and a radical form of conservation is chosen to preference architectural-style-guide-purity as the primary aesthetic value.
Some time ago my good friend, Richard Collier, and I were musing about the heritage values and character-defining elements of Hatley Park, the former home of James Dunsmuir, and now the centre piece of Royal Roads University. It occurred to us that the fact that it was a Tudor Revival style building, that it had been designed by one of British Columbia’s premier architects of the day, Samuel Maclure, and that it was built for one of the richest and most powerful men in the province at that time, were secondary considerations. What struck us most was that the day it was finished, it was supposed to look 400 years old, within the Ruskinian aesthetic tradition.
When Hatley Park was being built, Otto Wagner and Adolph Loos were designing modern buildings in Vienna, the Chicago School had created the skyscraper and Frank Lloyd Wright was designing his prairie houses for Oak Park, Illinois. More than simply a style of architecture, Hatley Park is a reactionary essay in pre-World War I Edwardian conservatism where the past and its traditions mattered more than the evolving modern world, all of which were to be shattered on the Western Front. So how should we conserve such a heritage? Quite simply, architectural restoration would do it great harm, while careful conservation of a hundred years of patina, the golden stain of Hatley Park’s times, would speak to what this place was intended to be from the start – old. Perhaps it is a lesson we should all heed when we try to decide what values are important and how best to steward them.
