What Is ‘Perpetual Change’? Concept or Protocol(s) of Change in John Ruskin as Substance of Architectural Writing

As an architect and philosopher respectively, we have written a two‑part text (architectural‑philosophical) that would present the main outlines and figures of writing about architecture and architectural writing in John Ruskin. His endeavour to describe buildings and cities transformed into an imperative to find ‘the substance of the architectural’, simultaneously preserving the utmost significance of its ontological aspect, that is, change. We reconstruct Ruskin’s understanding of various protocols of ‘change’ in two different ways: first, within the general difficulty in the histories of Western culture and thought to determine ‘change’ (which is certainly not a Western invention), and where Ruskin’s contribution is crucial. Further, we understand Ruskin’s project as being in a state of tension between continuous amendment of his written description of buildings, while defending the paradoxical intransience of change that goes beyond the objects in which it is manifested. Ruskin’s method of endless correction and revision thus becomes an introduction to the preservation of the unadaptable and unchanging, and then also the beautiful.