Henry van de Velde is one of a number of modernist architects who have acknowledged a significant debt to Ruskin, including Le Corbusier, Hermann Muthesius, Walter Gropius, Josef Hoffmann, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. Van de Velde references Ruskin as ‘the first awakening, in our century, of artistic sensibility and artistic morality.’ For Ruskin too, architecture’s ‘lamp of memory’ and its ‘golden stain of time’ symbolised not only physical, but moral and spiritual reconstruction, and the reappropriation of tradition as a pivotal intellectual resource.

This symposium will take as its starting point Ruskin’s ideas as an architectural theorist and his influence on twentieth-century architectural thought, and potential conflict between the two. The symposium is hosted by de Boekentoren, Ghent University Library, and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University, in partnership with The Ruskin – Museum & Research Institute at Lancaster University, and the schools of architecture at the Universities of Lancaster, Edinburgh and Bologna.

Read a building as you ‘would read Milton or Dante,’ Ruskin advised readers of The Stones of Venice. Simultaneously proleptic and analeptic, Ruskin’s architectural studies comprised a flashforward into a vanishing world. We invite papers reappraising Ruskin’s influence on modernist architecture and the visual arts and his analyses of the crisis and reinvention of form in the modern age.

Centred in architecture and the visual arts, on building as material and metaphor, and on the generative temporalities of word and image, this interdisciplinary symposium seeks to develop new perspectives for examining Ruskin’s influence on European and American modernism and explore its resonance today. As T. S. Eliot wrote in 1931 with reference to art’s social and political responsibilities, ethics and aesthetics, ‘We need another Ruskin …’

Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

• John Ruskin
• Architecture
• Visual Arts
• Literature
• Environmental Humanities
• Aesthetics and affect
• Materials and meanings
• Temporalities
• Global Modernisms

The symposium is free to attend.

Accommodation and a contribution towards travel
(up to €250 for Europe and UK, and up to €500
for international) will be provided for speakers.

Some bursary funding is available
for PhD students and Post Docs.

Registration opens: 1 December 2026

Submission of abstract via email to the-ruskin@lancaster.ac.uk:
by 16 October 2026 to include:

• Author name(s) and affiliation(s)
• Email address
• Abstract (up to 250 words)
• Biographical paragraph (up to 150 words)

Notification of paper acceptance: 16 November 2026

Submission of full paper deadline: by 1 February 2027

Department of Architecture and Urban Planning
Ghent University

The Ruskin – Museum & Research Institute
Lancaster University

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
University of Edinburgh

Department of Architecture
Università di Bologna

de Boekentoren
Ghent University Library

Dr Hendrik Defoort
Head of Collections, de Boekentoren, Ghent University Library

Professor Mark Dorrian
Forbes Chair in Architecture, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Yannick Joosten
PhD Researcher, University of Bologna and Ghent University

Professor Sandra Kemp
Director, The Ruskin – Museum & Research Institute, Lancaster University

Professor Dirk De Meyer
Professor in the History of Architecture and Architectural Design, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University