Robert Hewison in Conversation with Jorge Otero-Pailos

Jorge Otero-Pailos, director of Columbia GSAPP's Historic Preservation Program, speaks with British cultural historian Robert Hewison during the Spring 2017 Semester, when Hewison taught the course “John Ruskin and the 19th Century” at Columbia GSAPP. They discuss Hewison’s life-long fascination and study of John Ruskin, teaching students to draw as means of exploring truth, and the influence of Ruskin’s thinking on the field of preservation in particular through his study of Venice. The conversation took place in advance of Hewison’s lecture “John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye”, held at the School on February 16, 2017. “Ruskin was an expert in interdisciplinarity, long before interdisciplinarity had been invented. To study Ruskin, you have to study literature, you have to understand art history, you also have to be prepared to think about geology, to think about botany; and you’ve got to think about economics, political economy and all those things. Because as Ruskin’s mind expanded away from just writing about art and architecture, the next step was to write about society, political economy, and so on.” —Robert Hewison