1 RUSKIN AND BEYOND: VITAL SURFACES AND THE MAKING OF ARCHITECTURE Anuradha Chatterjee Abstract The Chapter mounts an argument against the conceptual and physical thinness of surface, in nineteenth and early twentieth century architectural theory and imagination, and charts a return to surface as space, and as substance. John Ruskin’s writings on building fragments and surfaces are rescued from the dissonance between nineteenth century visual culture’s surface orientation and architectural theory’s emphasis on structure and space. They are reframed as the theory of buildings as dressed bodies. Ruskin’s view of architecture as pure surfaceness, a point of discursive rupture, opens up the spatial field, such that it becomes possible to imagine surface as the ‘building block’ of architecture. The Chapter presents additional surface typologies, and explores the agency of urban surfaces through a study of three Melbourne buildings. Introduction Surfaces, says Joseph A. Amato (2013, p. 1), ‘evade easy definition.’ In fact, the more they are defined the more slippery and elusive they become. Surfaces may be defined as skin (Cheng 2016; Lutpon 2002), textile and textility (Anusas and Ingold), image (Flusser 2000), screen (Bruno 2014), blur (Di Palma 2006), materials and materiality (Ingold 2007), effect (Benjamin 2006), and the instrument of perception (Gibson 1979). In architecture, surface can be specifically identified as sometimes coexistent forms and effects—wall, plaster, paint, cladding, ornament, fenestrations (doors, windows, and louvers), projections (balconies and loggias), transparencies/reflections/translucencies, and image. Nevertheless, according to Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelly, surfaces are the ‘external appearance of things, easily manipulated, and within many traditions of thought, are held to be of lesser consequence than “deeper” or more “substantive” interiorities (2013, 1).’ This fuels the tendency to ‘rush past the surface to excavate more complex inner truth (1).’ A number of literary scholars call this condition “surface blindness.” This is partially true for architectural theory and practice, where