28 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

size. Thus we have church building, house building, ship building, and coach building. That one edifice stands, another floats, and another is suspended on iron springs, makes no difference in the nature of the art, if so it may be called, of building or edification. The persons who profess that art, are severally builders, ecclesiastical, naval, or of whatever other name their work may justify: but building does not become architecture merely by the stability of what it erects; and it is no more architecture which raises a church, or which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a required number of persons occupied in certain religious offices, than it is architecture which makes a carriage commodious, or a ship swift. I do not, of course, mean that the word is not often, or even may not be legitimately, applied in such a sense (as we speak of naval architecture); but in that sense architecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is therefore better not to run the risk, by loose nomenclature, of the confusion which would arise, and has often arisen, from extending principles which belong altogether to building, into the sphere of architecture proper.

Let us, therefore, at once confine the name to that art which, taking up and admitting, as conditions of its working, the necessities and common uses of the building, impresses on its form certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary. Thus, I suppose, no one would call the laws architectural which determine the height of a breastwork or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone facing of that

the mental arch-in the sense in which Plato uses that word in the “Laws”-which separates architecture from a wasp’s nest, a rat hole, or a railway station. [1880.]¹

¹ [Later passages in the text and notes explain that what Ruskin means by “the mental arch,” is “arrangement and government received from human mind” (ch. iii. § 2, p. 101); “the intellectual Dominion of Architecture” (ch. iv. § 1 n., p. 138); including “authority over materials” (ch. ii. § 10 n., p. 68). For the sense in which Plato thus uses the word arch (or rather the verb arcw) in the Laws, see, e.g., Book ix., 875 D: “Nor can mind, without impiety, be deemed the subject or slave of any man, but rather the ruler of all.” Compare, with the text and note here, the similar distinctions drawn in The Poetry of Architecture, § 133, Vol. I. p. 105. Compare also in Ruskin’s later books, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 60, The Two Paths, § 106; and see Modern Painters, vol. ii. ch. i. (Vol. IV. p. 35 n.), where Ruskin again defends his “subjection of the constructive to the decorative science of architecture which gave so much offence, to architects capable only of construction, in the Seven Lamps.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]