An Exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum Examines the Neoclassical Architect’s Role as Modernist Forebear
Visitors to John Soane’s extraordinary house-museum in London can have no doubt that he was steeped in history. Its sepulchral basement is filled to bursting with a collection of antiquities befitting a Neoclassical architect whose education culminated in the 18th-century Grand Tour. Plaster friezes and Greco-Roman busts on fluted columns cluster around a 3,000-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus. But was Soane also a kind of proto-Modernist, a century or more ahead of his time? That’s the contention of an insightful exhibition in the small but sumptuous gallery on the museum’s second floor titled Soane and Modernism: Make it New.
The case is made by pairing drawings from the museum’s Soanian holdings with those by 20th-century luminaries on loan from the London-based Drawing Matter Collection. So a section through brises-soleil at Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh museum hangs alongside Soane’s innovative top-lit Dulwich Picture Gallery—the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery on its completion in 1817. Soane’s detailed study of a skeletal wooden bridge in Switzerland sits below a pencil drawing of an elegant concrete footbridge by structural engineer Ove Arup.
The intention behind the show, explains curator Erin McKellar, was twofold: first, it should give a jolt to many of the museum’s 150,000-plus annual visitors who come simply to see a historic house. “Most leave without taking time to consider what was really new and radical in Soane’s work,” she says, “of which there is a huge amount.”
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Aldo Rossi, Urban Scene/Scena Per il Teatrino, 1978. Drawing Matter, © The Aldo Rossi Estate, 2024 (1); Frank Lloyd Wright, Arch Oboler House/‘Eaglefeather,’ rendered perspective, 1940. Collection of Drawing Matter (2).
Second, the drawings by celebrated near-contemporaries are a “hook” to lure aficionados of PoMo or Brutalism whose tastes don’t yet extend to the classical. (As an American, McKellar was particularly pleased to showcase a colored pencil rendering of the Eaglefeather retreat in Malibu, California, by Frank Lloyd Wright with John Lautner).
Her work began at Drawing Matter, searching through its extensive archive until she spotted “something Soane,” and then looking for a good match at the museum. The selection is hugely diverse, pointing to the range of arguably more “Modernist” tropes in Soane’s oeuvre.
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Robert Dennis Chantrell for John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, bird’s-eye view of the west side from the south, 13 August 1812; SM Volume 81_20 (3); Joseph Michael Gandy for John Soane, Pitzhanger Manor, design for the lawn front and conservatory, August 1810. SM Volume 60_69. Photos by Geremy Butler (3), Ardon Bar Hama (4) © Sir John Soane’s Museum
Some connections are truly arresting. Above the gridded elevation of a 1961 office building by Ernő Goldfinger, we see a watercolor of Soane’s unrealized extension to his country house, Pitzhanger Manor, made 160 years earlier. Its two-story glass facade is pictured with the delicacy, modular repetition and aqueous shimmer of a modern curtain wall.
Other juxtapositions add fascinating texture to the Soane story. Giles Gilbert Scott’s 1935 design for London’s iconic red telephone boxes is presented next to the shallow-domed tomb designed by Soane for his beloved wife Eliza, which might have provided the inspiration. This is speculation but seems plausible as Gilbert Scott was a trustee of the museum in the 1920s, when Soane’s work was being rediscovered by architects after a long period of neglect.
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His influence on contemporary architects such as Tony Fretton is more certain; the show includes several of Fretton’s closely observed sketches of the museum alongside drawings of his exquisite, minimalist Lisson Gallery (1992), which is similarly composed of adjacent houses.
Photo © Gareth Gardener, courtesy Sir John Soane's Museum
Items on view include several of the paintings Soane liked to commission, showing his buildings both under construction and imagined as roofless ruins, often in bucolic landscapes. Stripped of ornament in either case, they also help to suggest a “modern” interest in structure and space as the essence of architecture.
Soane’s fame rests in large part on his genius with a plan, which is highlighted in another pairing. In a 1958 design by Aldo van Eyck and Hannie van Rooijen for their own unrealized home, circular or rectangular spaces are nested or chained together, to resemble a cluster of cells. Soane’s 1811 plan for the unbuilt Combe House is still constrained by the rectilinear footprint of a symmetrical building, but within it he jigsaws a variety of formal and servant spaces, with inter-connections and ancillary niches to add interest.
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Photos © Gareth Gardener, courtesy Sir John Soane's Museum
It must be said that some connections are more tenuous. In one vitrine, drawings show Soane making an urban feature of a corner of the Bank of England, while next door Alvaro Siza is doing something similar with public housing in Portugal. An interesting comparison, if not strong evidence of modernity.
Even here, however, there are striking parallels. Both architects gather plans, sections, and elevations on single sheets, with scribblings over and marginal additions made as a constellation of ideas is condensed into coherent form. Like many drawings in the show, they are salutary glimpses into the moment of creation—when buildings and concepts we now take for granted were indeed new—and hint at the imagination, curiosity, and effort required to wrestle them into being. Soane may have been ahead of his time, but some things, it seems, never change.
Soane and Modernism: Make it New is on view at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, through May 18.
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