From Ruskin to Aalto; Prophets with a Message?

Abstract

This thesis and its associated works critically explore the shift in philosophical views on nature from 'created' to 'machine' and their use as analogies for design and architecture from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century. I trace both a penetrating description of a 'created' cosmology for architecture and design expounded by John Ruskin at the very point of point of its decline with the rise of scientific materialism/reductionism as a replacement cosmology that gains traction following Darwin's theory of evolution. The thesis looks at the intermediate tension between the two cosmologies outworked by architects and designers of the period as they engage/disengage the shift with a focus on the early modernist Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to show what we might learn for the present. The theoretical/conceptual approach for the work firstly establishes the two philosophical concepts and their characteristics (what they and their outcomes look like), and secondly how we might learn from them to understand and engage Colquhoun's problematic 'closed system' of the present. Colquhoun describes contemporary attempts by architects to engage the 'forms' of the 'other' as 'inescapably modern', Koestler describes the wider philosophical dilemma in 1969 as 'rebellion in a vacuum'. The methodology of the thesis involves a triangulated dialectic interface, a synthesis of three protagonists. These are the Victorian theorist and artist John Ruskin, the early modernist architect and designer Alvar Aalto and myself as a contemporary artist. Design of the study explores the historical and contextual continuity of the protagonists with critical input and exchange from secondary sources. The studio works as centered around Norseman Western Australia are location/nature/culturally/philosophically specific as advocated by Ruskin and Aalto. I show that there are meaningful and significant connections to be made between two key historical figures John Ruskin and Alvar Aalto as yet unexplored. Also, the manner in which architectural historians have overlooked the connections, and the difficulty they have in understanding Aalto, (for that matter Ruskin also) with multiple, contradictory even confused explanations. By embracing an epistemology appropriate to both men's beliefs facilitates a more robust understanding of them and their message for the contemporary condition, myself included. The studio component of the research offers an informed and challenging discourse. It is coupled with an exploration and approach in the developments of artifacts and their relationships within a shared epistemology/ontology.