Ruskin's definition of architecture as the art that ''impresses on its forms certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary'' is at heart an ornamental conception of architecture, and one that is sensuous in its exaltation of materiality. They are eternal principles for Ruskin that transcend the everyday world and that provide the designer with a larger mission than of simply providing shelter. The seven lamps - sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, obedience - are beacons to serve the aspiring architect. The Seven Lamps of Architecture is a book written by someone who was still little more than an amateur in the field. He was firm in his rejection of industrialization and an undying foe of the ugliness that he ascribed to modern civilization politically, he was socialist who later tried, but failed, to establish a rural guild based on communal principles of ownership and labor. As a result Ruskin came to despise every other style - the classical and the Renaissance in particular - and he shared with Pugin the belief that humanity can only be saved by returning to a medieval culture of piety and humility. In the same decade he made several trips to the Continent, during which he studied medieval architecture, in particular that of France and Italy. Loudon's Architectural Magazine, but he established his reputation as a critic with the first volume of Modern Painters, which appeared in 1843. While still a student at Oxford in the 1830s, he wrote several articles entitled ''The Poetry of Architecture'' for J. Although he too had no formal architectural training, he was a man of high intellect and moral pretension, a complex, even fragile, personality, whose mind eventually cut itself off from commerce with the real world.
Perhaps the most prominent figure to emerge during this decade was John Ruskin, a writer who would influence architectural theory in Britain and the United States like no author before him. The British architectural debate of the early 1840s began to take on an entirely different character by the end of the decade, as the forces supporting classicism, the Gothic, the Renaissance, eclecticism, and the creation of an entirely new style now clashed in a highly spirited and for the most part quite sophisticated debate.
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