ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role played by remembrance and the blurred borders between nature and culture in Ruskin's thinking. It presents Ruskin's views on how to build in a landscape are founded on a specific understanding of how human beings belong in the world. Ruskin is leading human back to the Aristotelian view of poiesis as a field of human life and activity, different from but related to theora and praxis, human theoretical and practical life. Ruskin belongs to the 'eye-thinking' tradition of Greek metaphysics. The composition of an aesthetic totality, Ruskin says, depends upon the shaping and making proportional of the dark and shadowy parts of the building material. The principal aspect of colouring is the use of shadows. A young architect, Ruskin says, must first of all learn to think in terms of shadows. Architecture's preservation of the human is for Ruskin first and foremost to be found in its element of remembrance.
