IN the 1880s, James Templeton, Scottish carpet-maker and quintessential Victorian capitalist, had a problem. He believed a new factory was needed to house an innovative process he had developed for the production of the Axminster carpet, and he chose Glasgow Green as a suitable site. Plainly imaginative and inventive, and far from the dour stereotype of the manufacturer whose only concern was with what is now called the bottom line, he was one of many Victorian businessmen who cared about the external image of their businesses, as can be seen by merely stopping to stare at the quality of the surviving 19th-century architecture in central Glasgow.

Templeton aspired to create a striking and memorable structure which would both enhance the city and serve his purpose of increasing production, and proposed two plans to the Glasgow Corporation. To his dismay, both were rejected. He then called one of the leading architects of the day William Leiper and asked him what was the most beautiful building in the world. Leiper replied that it was the Doge’s Palace in Venice. “That’s what I want for my carpet factory,” Templeton told him, giving him the commission.

This version of the story was told to me by the late Jack House, author and journalist, nicknamed Mr Glasgow for his encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s history. It is intriguing to speculate what manner of building might now be gracing Glasgow Green had Leiper given pride of place to the Taj Mahal or the great Pyramid of Giza, but no matter. In a sense, he could not have answered differently, for the architectural culture of the time was in thrall to the outlook of John Ruskin, who regarded the Venetian Gothic as the supreme achievement of Western architecture.

Few writers or critics have had such an impact on the structure of cities in the English-speaking world as Ruskin. The early 19th century had seen the Gothic Revival in Britain, firstly in churches and then in such public buildings as town halls and the Houses of Parliament, but Ruskin was not impressed by the work of such practitioners as Gilbert Scott or Augustus Pugin. He championed the different style of Gothic he had observed in Venice and had written about so passionately in his multi-volume work The Stones of Venice. The Venetian Gothic became the fashion in the high Victorian age. The most celebrated examples include the railway station in Mumbai, imitated by the station in Dunedin, while Glasgow boasts the Ca’ d’Oro, the Western Baths and the now disused Stock Exchange in Mandela Place. The Tivoli theatre in Aberdeen, designed by local architect James Matthews is in the same style. There are many more.

The Templeton-on-the-Green, as it is now known, is the only one modelled on one Venetian palace and not on some generalised idea. Perhaps its position has caused it to be overlooked, but it is Glasgow’s most gloriously colourful and perhaps most distinguished, building, apart from Rennie Mackintosh’s recently destroyed School of Art. The remarkable facade is decorated by bright brick patterns, colonnades and delicately crafted windows whose frames point upwards to parapets along the roof, and the whole is topped by a central triangular structure crowned with the statue of a saint looking over the green. Ruskin wrote a chapter on the Truths of Colour, and the Templeton building emphatically embodies these truths. Where else is there an industrial factory which reverentially recalls the medieval residence of the ruler of Venice?

Would Ruskin have been pleased? Never a man for the understatement, he considered the Doge’s Palace itself “the central building of the world”, but it is hard to know what he would have made of this imitation in Glasgow. He was not so much a man of contradictions as of changing certainties. In certain moods, he was unsure of the appropriateness of mixing beauty and labour, and stated that the pursuit of beauty was permissible only in conditions of leisure. “Wherever you can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is beauty. You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you may mix play. Work first, and then rest.” Curiously, that kind of teaching corresponds more to the now accepted notion of Victorian earnestness than anything actually espoused by Templeton.

In 1872, well before the construction of the Templeton building, Ruskin himself came to have doubts about the spread in Britain of the mock-Venetian, and to reproach himself for his part in popularising the style. He wrote: “I have had an indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this (his own home in London) and Bromley, and there is scarcely a public house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin and bitter under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of Madonna of Health or of Miracles.” He felt obliged to move from his home because he saw it “surrounded everywhere by accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making.” It is an irony that the converted Templeton building now houses a pub.

Whatever his self-scourging, Ruskin is due gratitude for his part in embellishing urban architecture in Scotland and around the world. He himself, as his first biographers record, believed that his intellectual and religious formation was essentially Scottish. The official biography, written by WG Collingwood under Ruskin’s gaze, opens with the words: “If origin, if early training and habits of life, if tastes, if character and associations fix a man’s character, then John Ruskin must be reckoned a Scotsman.” He was born in London in 1819, but his family on both sides was from Scotland.

Collingwood identified the principal influences on him as Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle as well as various, anonymous educators, all from Scotland, and adds that “the religious instinct so conspicuous in him was a heritage of Scotland”. However, Ruskin’s culture was cosmopolitan. He travelled widely and learned from his experiences elsewhere, mainly in Italy and in the Swiss Alps.

Certainly he spent some time in Scotland. The most famous of all portraits of him, commissioned by his father and now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, has him standing on a rock in the stream in Glenfinlas, every inch a majestic, commanding figure. The back story is less splendid since the artist was the Pre-Raphaelite, John Everett Millais, who fell in love with Ruskin’s wife Effie Gray. Although Effie and Ruskin had been married for several years, the marriage was never consummated, and after meeting Millais she filed not for divorce but for annulment. Medical examination confirmed the claim that she was still intacta. The affair caused a scandal in Victorian England, but contemporaries record that Ruskin seemed unperturbed.

He continued writing and lecturing, although in his later years he fell prey to severe mental illness and retired to his home in the Lake District. His intellectual heritage has been bitterly contested. In his autobiography he declared himself a “violent Tory”, but by the time he wrote those words, he had developed more radical views and had abandoned both the conservatism and militant Protestantism of his youth to devote himself to campaigning to improve the condition of working people. His growing distaste for capitalist society means that he can be regarded as one of founders of the British tradition of socialism.

THIS new ideology is not a break from his study of Venetian history and architecture but rather an extension of it and an application of it to contemporary society. His love was for medieval Venice, and he abhorred the Renaissance which is normally regarded as the glory of the city. Some of his expressions of his detestation were almost comically exaggerated. He recounts requesting the sacristan of San Giovanni e Paolo, where the grandees of Venetian history are buried, to provide him with a ladder to allow him to climb up and examine the tomb of a doge. He was horrified to discover that the sculptor had carved only the part which could be seen from below, and had not spent equal time on the unseen side. No other critic is likely to view this as criminal, but for Ruskin it was the proof that the Renaissance was a hoax.

The superior value of the Gothic lay in the paradoxical fact that it allowed for human imperfection, that it was the work of artisans and craftsmen who were enabled to express their own creativity. Ruskin came to abhor the moral bankruptcy of the industrial age and the degradation of workmen implicit in that process. For him it was an offence to human dignity to have men work “with the accuracy of tools” and any attempt to compel them to do so was “to unhumanise them”. He saw the same denial of creativity in contemporary industry as in Renaissance Venice, and dedicated his energy to working for a society where profits were shared and the inventiveness of working men respected.

The Templeton building is a monument to Ruskin’s aesthetic vision, but its mode of construction was not necessarily in keeping with his radical social beliefs.