SOURCE: "The Conservation of Our Cities: Ruskin's Message for Today," in Topics of Our Time: Twentieth-Century Issues in Learning and in Art, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 74-91.

In the following essay, Gombrich uses quotations and excerpts from Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture to argue for conserving buildings from earlier times.

Be it heard or not, I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us.

I know of no clearer or more uncompromising answer to the question 'Why preserve historic buildings?' than these defiant words, which John Ruskin wrote in 1849. They are taken from...