Architecture and Forgetting: the Memory in Ruskin

Writer and English fine arts critic of the 19th century, John Ruskin is the author in 1849 of The seven lamps of architecture. This theorical work tries to define the fundamentals of architecture. One of the seven chapters of this book, “the sixth lamp”, is dedicated to the memory and those links with architecture. This development is based on forgetting but this question is treated by the way with the antonym : the memory. In a dynamic approach where nostalgia and value judgment are ruled out , memory is developped by the substitution of forgetting. This thinking on the memory obliged Ruskin to attribute to architecture a memory finality that differs from the commemoration aim of the monument. In fact with this term, Ruskin asks the question of the meaning of architecture and calls out to the sense of the space’s creation and uses. Those reflexions contribute to put the question of the architecture’s permanency. The term of memory offers to him the opportunity to examine the notion of time and the period’s representation by building concrete spaces. With this singular consideration, he shows that architecture offers to the man the possibilty to come within through the space and the time with architectural objects which are the evidences of living and building. Architecture would becoming with this approach a kind of building’s archives, that will support the partial and biased memory, in a dynamic and dialectic way between erasing the tracks and the conservation of the stratums.