A fitting shrine to the sublime

When I was a student, in the mid-1970, I bought a complete 39volume Cook & Wedderburn edition of the works of John Ruskin for £15. Fifteen pounds. The man in tobaccoey tweeds who ran the bookshop watched in a mixture of puzzlement and bibliophilic pride as I built up my first collection of Ruskin at 20p and 30p a time. When a pile of dusty boxes arrived at the end of my last term, full of more "bloody old Ruskins", the bookseller seemed only too pleased to take my £15 to help clear a bit of space for modern technobabble books on politics and economics that sold to serious students who never missed a lecture.

That set of books would be worth several thousand pounds today. I have since sent them packing to a deserving home, and must admit that they went their way with octavos uncut. Ruskin had the money and time to write as if ink were water and clocks stoppable. Yet, Unto This Last and On The Nature Of The Gothic still send shivers up my spine.

I read them again on the rackety Virgin "express" to Lancaster (Ruskin's spirit was willing the wretched thing to de-rail itself: he hated trains. I hate the destruction of the English railway system for private gain). They reminded me why I bother to write about architecture and why I can't begin to write without thinking about the societies that produce it and its penchant for good or ill.

"I simply cannot paint nor read," wrote Ruskin in Fors Clavigera (papers addressed to the workmen of Great Britain, who probably didn't read them), "because of the misery that I know of."

This sentiment might sound precious today, yet it might still ring loudly in our ears. Who can afford to care as deeply about art as Ruskin did when the rich are still getting richer while the poor have been given the sop of satellite TV?

Ruskin was very rich (inheriting a fortune from his father, a partner in the Domecq-Ruskin sherry empire); before he died in 1900, he had given just about all his money away.

The home my creamy-paged collected Ruskins might have gone to, if I had had the foresight to imagine it would ever exist, is the new Ruskin Library, designed by MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, at the University of Lancaster.

This fine building - modern, yet highly crafted and finished by hand throughout its memorable interior - is devoted to Ruskin's books, diaries, daguerreotypes and the scholarship his life and thought has spawned. They have been garnered from collections formerly split between Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight and Brantwood, Ruskin's last home, overlooking Coniston Water in the Lake District.

What surprises me is that Ruskin should have such a fine new home a century after his death. It's not that his written legacy and his restless spirit don't deserve it, it's just that I had thought Ruskin a spent force. Public money - notably the Heritage Lottery Fund - has gone Ruskin's way here.

But what will the public make of it? Ruskin scholarship has blossomed over the past 20 years - in India, Japan and the US, as well as in Britain - yet public interest, when it exists, is devoted pretty much entirely to the writer's love life (or lack of it). Ruskin may not have known how to love fully the women he worshipped - Effie Grey, Rose La Touche, Francesca Alexander, Kathleen Olander - but he knew how to teach others to love those things the human hand and eye could create when in love with nature and the creative impulse.

Through his writings and practical example, Ruskin schooled a generation of young architects, artists, designers and craftsmen to turn their hearts, if not their backs, on the machine world and to fight the Satan of liberal economics that caused them to be poor.

Ruskin's early love affair with Venice is said to have been responsible for the rash of ugly neo-Venetian architecture that sprang up in Britain, Ireland and the US in the 1860s and 1870s. Ruskin was shocked by this misrepresentation of his passion, describing the style as "an accursed Frankenstein monster of my own making".

His real and lasting influence, however, was on the design of the superb houses for the working classes built at first by the young architects of the London County Council in the 1890s and 1900s, and then across Europe by socialist architects and for whom Ruskin spoke louder than Marx.

And the Ruskin Library? Is this a Ruskinian building? Up to a point. Richard MacCormac has long championed an approach to Modern architecture that the Architectural Review once described as "Romantic Pragmatism", by which it meant the design of buildings raised up from functional plans (a core obsession of the Modern movement derived, in part, from Ruskin and Pugin before him), yet facing the world in artistic dress (bricks and tiles, stone and decorative glass rather than unmitigated planes of concrete, steel and sheet glass).

In the design of the Ruskin Library, a baptistery-like building shaped (on plan) like a giant eye, MacCormac has taken this theme a step further. If the clean, white lines of the concrete-aggregate exterior, girdled with thin green stripes, are as sharply defined and as well-polished as those of the cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto, those of the interior are characterised by the impress of the human hand. Where the exterior seems whiter than white, the interior is rich and warm and red. Hand finished paint. Limewash and Venetian plaster. Linseed oiled walls. Timber furniture, crafted locally.

Brilliantly, MacCormac has cut away the ends of the library so that this colour and warmth - "a kind of internal weather", he suggests, "a feeling of dappled changeability" - is exposed: a magnet, or temptation, drawing the visitor inexorably inside. The effect is rather like looking into the beauty of the human eye.

THE idea of revealing the interior is really the core of MacCormac's design. The curved exterior walls exist to deflect the sea winds battering the university campus and to protect the inner-library (the Holy of Holies) within. So, the collection itself is housed (much like the King's Library, in the new British Library, although on a much reduced scale) inside a powerfully defined structure within the main building. It's a delightful conceit, and it works. Once drawn in, this is a comforting library to work in, although not a place for those in need of severe lines, bright light, white walls, difficult glasses and black polo-neck jumpers. The whole building is in marked contrast with the rest of the well-planned, if maudlin, 1960s campus.

Beyond its role as a library and Ruskin reliquary, this elliptical building performs other valuable duties. From the road leading up to the university, it acts as an unforgettable gateway anchoring this seat of learning to its dramatic site. Protected inside the enfolding wings of the library's entrance, there are wonderful views to be had of Morecambe Bay, stretching for, I don't know, five miles or more. There is great pleasure to be had sitting inside this ship of the intellect on a wind-whipped winter's evening, poring through old books and listening to the thunder of Ruskin's tempest-tossed prose.

This is one of Britain's best new buildings. By the time it has grown into its setting, the Tate Gallery will be holding its comprehensive Ruskin, Turner and pre-Raphaelite show. And then, in the year 2000, a building designed as a shrine will truly become one.