Date a Gothic window by its tracery: openings pierced through a plate (twelfth century); geometric bar tracery of circles and foils (thirteenth); flowing curvilinear tracery of ogees and daggers (fourteenth); and, in England, perpendicular panel tracery with mullions running straight up into the arch (late fourteenth to sixteenth).
Rules · Theory · Materials · Ornament
The Lamp of Truth
Commit no architectural deceit: do not suggest a structure other than the real one, do not paint or carve one material to look like another, and do not pass off cast or machine-made ornament as handwork.
Ruskin’s three deceits define much of later thinking about honesty in building. The first condemns, for example, hanging pendants from a roof that suggest support where there is none; the second, graining and marbling; the third, the cast-iron and composition ornament of Victorian industry. He allowed that some concealment is legitimate (a wall need not show every brick), but not a lie about what holds the building up or what it is made of.
Related rules
Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.
Let each material reveal its own character (the grain of wood, the stratification of stone, the plasticity of concrete) and design each part in the way its material wants to be used.
Let there be no feature about a building that is not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; and let all ornament be the enrichment of the essential construction.
Let a town’s churches and public buildings, not its engines of utility, shape its skyline: a spire to each parish, halls for its guilds, a cross in its market place.
Arrange a building for its uses first and let its outline follow: gables, bays, chimneys and towers go where the rooms behind need them. Never contrive irregularity for effect, and never force a symmetrical front on an unsymmetrical plan.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Lamp of Truth”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/ruskin-lamp-of-truth. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.