FollowMaterial, Metaphor and Modernity: Ruskin and Architecture (de Boekentoren, Ghent University Library, 3-5 March 2027).
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. 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. Centred in architecture and the visual arts, on building as material and metaphor, and on the generative temporalities of word and image, 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. This interdisciplinary symposium seeks to develop new perspectives for examining Ruskin’s influence on European and American modernism and explore its resonance today.
Please see website for full Call for Papers and details for submitting Abstracts: Material, Metaphor and Modernity: Ruskin and Architecture
Submission deadline: 16 October 2026