Previously: The Seven Lamps Project (Introduction) In my previous post about the Seven Lamps Project. I mentioned that I’d be reading through each chapter and hopefully summarizing each as a blog post. This is meant to help me absorb and wrestle with the material, since I’m forced to put it in to my own words (other than quotations of course). The end goal is to synthesize this work with the practice of software architecture.

I’m starting a new project that I expect to take a while. I’d like to do a very careful reading1 of John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture, taking notes with a mind towards eventually synthesizing and harmonizing Ruskin’s views of physical architecture with a conception of software architecture. This isn’t the first time I’ve read the book. My previous reading was casual and mostly consisted of reading it before bed on a Kindle (a poor way to do analysis during reading).

Sertillanges speaking about “hard science” in The Intellectual Life — Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods: The sciences, without philosophy, discrown themselves and lose their direction. The sciences and philosophy without theology discrown themselves more lamentably, since the crown they repudiate is a heavenly one; and they go more irremediably astray, for earth without heaven cannot find the path of its orbit, nor the influences that give it fruitfulness. And a continuation of the previous quote: