John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture was published in 1849. The book is immensely ambitious in scope. The seven ‘lamps’ – memory, obedience, sacrifice, truth, power, beauty and life – are in fact individual essays which add up to a comprehensive theory of architecture. The background to the theory, and the spirit which pervades it, is Romanticism, the cultural movement which swept all before it at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The Lamp of Memory deals with architectural tradition and the way that architecture can express a culture and a period. Are Ruskin’s precepts still true? Indeed, were they ever true? Does Romanticism still have meaning for us or does it belong to a museum of ideas?

Richard Hill is an associate at Richard Griffiths Architects, a practice that has a great deal of experience in the integration of new buildings into historic settings, and in architectural conservation generally. He is the author of Designs and their Consequences: Architecture and Aesthetics (1999). He has taught at universities in Britain, the United States and Italy.