Seeking Authenticity: Late Victorian Aesthetic Researches in John Ruskin’s approach of the St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice and William Lethaby’s Design for the Eagle Building in Birmingham (1851-1901), David Lamoureux

The two artefacts described and contrasted here are John Ruskin’s 1851 description of the St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice and the facade of William Lethaby’s 1901 Eagle Building in Birmingham. Both Ruskin’s description and Lethaby’s facade are part of a common search for authenticity realized in the light of criticisms of industrialization in the late nineteenth century. Lethaby’s attempt to define architectural authenticity as compatible with industrial processes, however, seems to prefigure a greater interdisciplinary switch from a moral and Romantic view to a scientific and material understanding of society.