Includes two of John Ruskin's famous essays: "The Nature of the Gothic" and "The Work of Iron" from his book The Stones of Venice. Ruskin's insights into the need for individual artistic freedom, and his disdain for the mass-production art of the Victorian era, radically altered society's perception of creative design and remain powerfully relevant to our ideas of beauty today.

An innovative and lavishly illustrated account of the art, writings, and global influence of one of the 19th century's most influential thinkers This book presents an innovative portrait of John Ruskin (1819-1900) as artist, art critic, social theorist, educator, and ecological campaigner. Ruskin's juvenilia reveal an early embrace of his lifelong interests in geology and botany, art, poetry, and mythology. His early admiration of Turner led him to identify the moral power of close looking. In The Stones of Venice, illustrated with his own drawings, he argued that the development of architectural style revealed the moral condition of society. Later, Ruskin pioneered new approaches to teaching and museum practice. Influential worldwide, Ruskin's work inspired William Morris, founders of the Labour Party, and Mahatma Gandhi. Through thematic essays and detailed discussions of his works, this book argues that, complex and contradictory, Ruskin's ideas are of urgent importance today. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (September 5-December 8, 2019)

To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

An art historian, cultural critic and political theorist, John Ruskin was, above all, a great educator. The inspiration behind William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi, Ruskin’s influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere education today. John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education brings together top international Ruskin scholars, exploring Ruskin’s many-faceted writings, pointing to some of the key educational issues raised by his work, and concluding with a powerful rereading of his ecological writing and apocalyptic vision of the earth’s future. In anticipation of the bicentennial of Ruskin’s birth in 2019, this volume makes a fresh and significant contribution to Victorian studies in the twenty-first century. It is dedicated to Dinah Birch, a much-loved Victorian specialist and authority on John Ruskin.

Who was John Ruskin? What did he achieve--and how? Where is he today? One possible answer: almost everywhere. Ruskin was the Victorian age's best-known and most controversial intellectual and polymath--an artist, scientist, critic, polemicist, social crusader, philanthropist, and early environmentalist. Two hundred years since his birth in 1819, his ideas have a fierce modern relevance. In Ruskinland, Andrew Hill, the award-winning Financial Times columnist, builds on Ruskin's pin-sharp appreciation of art and architecture, his extraordinary draughtsmanship, and his insistence that to see and draw the world is the best way to understand it better. The book lays out how Ruskin envisaged radical solutions to social inequality, excessive executive pay, flawed economic orthodoxy, advancing automation, environmental disaster, and meaningless work. It explains the importance of his prescient view of our fragile, interconnected world, and shows how Ruskin's radical ideas can still help us run our governments, our museums, our galleries, our companies, and our lives. Part travelogue, part quest, part unconventional biography, Ruskinland retraces Ruskin's steps, telling his exceptional and tragic life story, unearthing his influence, talking to people and visiting places--from Venice to Florida's Gulf coast--where Ruskin's foresighted ideas are, sometimes unexpectedly, alive today.