Modernism's Escape from God and Nature

      The Harry Ransom Center, referred to as the Humanities Research Center, represents the regression from dependence on spirituality and the absence of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the urban city in the past several hundred years, and along with it industry and technology, have attributed to the loss of the connection between man and nature. Furthermore, the architecture of buildings in the cities can show the steps in which the transformation away from God was made. The post-medieval Gothic style was used primarily in churches and colleges; buildings in which God was a definite presence. Even during the scientific revolution theology was a major course of study in European colleges; thus the style of these colleges and churches and buildings like them represent the connection between man, society, God, and nature: “God, man, nature, and language participated in each other and were at one.” This of course reflected the time when God was considered among the living, rather than high above and unobtainable.

      Ruskin’s third element of Gothic architecture is love of nature. He states that “no pleasure is taken anywhere in modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery” (Ruskin 546). But as more and more people began living in the urban centers, God and the connection between man and nature disappeared. Miller believes that “life in the city is the way in which many men have experienced most directly what it means to live without God in the world” (Miller 491). The HRC reflects the “floating box” of modernist architecture (Modernism website), and exhibits few (if any) naturalistic features in its design. Not only does it defy Ruskin’s call for changefulness and variety, but also the necessity of the love for nature in architectural design.

      Just as Ruskin describes, I find no pleasure in the Humanities Research Center. I believe it to be bland and unappealing to the eye. However, there is one point Ruskin makes that the HRC makes good on: that the building exemplifies the nature of mankind at that point. When Gothic architecture was being built, man and nature and God were still interconnected. Even when the Old Main Building and the Littlefield House were constructed, Texas was a wild and natural place and Austin was barely past the frontier town phase. However, as the population grows and expands outwards in a sea of concrete, the University of Texas has lost the connection to nature as mankind in general loses its connection to God. Ruskin states that in the building “there is a profound truth, which the instinct of mankind almost unconsciously recognizes” (Ruskin 540). While the HRC might be bland to me, it does represent the truth of mankind’s relationship to God and nature. Or perhaps, that is, the lack of a relationship. I am not asking for a third Great Awakening to give our buildings more personality; in fact, I am not quite sure what to do for our campus to exude more character. I am simply saddened by the fact that we have let our link to nature slip away from us. Just as the development of cities has affected the Romantic writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the architecture has noticeable effects as well. While Mark Twain spends more time discussing the role of the London smog in Great Expectations than he does portraying the role of God in Pip’s fortune, the HRC reflects less of the love for nature that Ruskin believes necessary for a building to be “true to nature.”