Book round-up 2

Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Published by Yale University Press

Sir John Soane is widely considered one of the greatest of British architects. His work, his intellectual development, his country house designs, his biography have all been much studied and written about. But there has been no extended, scholarly account of the extraordinary collection that he amassed in his London house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This collection contains over 40,000 objects – paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural fragments, plus thousands of books. Among its many treasures are numerous works by William Hogarth (the series A Rake’s Progress and Humours of an Election), Reynolds, Turner and Canaletto; numerous ancient vases; sculpture by some of Soane’s most famous contemporaries; and countless architectural fragments. The latter especially are arranged with a theatrical flair that takes the breath away. This new book by Bruce Boucher, former Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, is the account we have been waiting for.

The great mysteries are why Soane collected so profusely and obsessively, what drove the arrangement of the objects, and what his collection was actually for. Soane himself saw it as consisting of ‘studies for my own mind’, a phrase that only inspires further questions. Boucher’s book begins with the context: Soane’s sad life – the death of his beloved wife Eliza, his falling out with his sons, the harsh criticism that a lot of his work was subjected to. It describes how he obtained the items and how he was inspired by the time he spent in Italy, by the collections of fellow architects, and by writers from antiquarians to Gothic novelists.

Separate chapters examine his antiquities, his ancient Greek vases, his sculptures, and his paintings. Additional chapters explore key themes. One such is Soane’s enthusiasm for items related to eminent British writers and artists such as Shakespeare and Hogarth – ‘British worthies’ like those celebrated in the famous garden temple at Stowe, a country house where Soane worked. Another theme is his interest in Gothic taste – not so much scholarly Gothic revivalism as the atmospheric Gothic of novels, of faux ‘monk’s parlours’, stained glass windows, and gloomy tombs. Yet another theme is Soane’s love of picturesque ruins, which fed his purchase of everything from paintings of ruins to architectural fragments and models of ruined buildings – he even imagined what his building for the Bank of England would look like as a ruin. One more thread is formed by the patterns of connections between the paintings he owned – their links to some of his friends, and the series of architectural paintings by his friend J. M. Gandy.

None of this was set in stone because, as Boucher makes clear, Soane’s collection was constantly evolving. As the number objects grew and as Soane’s priorities changed, the scope and arrangement of the house-museum changed too. So there is no single reason why the architect bought plaster casts, models of buildings, books, paintings and sculptures. His motivation altered and an account of Soane’s collection has to offer several different reasons why its owner sunk so much of his money into it.

Boucher teases out various reasons why Soane collected and parallel intended purposes of his collection. The motivation was part didactic (the architectural items were aids to teaching); part consolation for the various tragedies in the architect’s life; part expressive of his role as a patron of the arts; part a way of promoting Soane’s fellow members of the Royal Academy. As the collection grew, and because one of his two sons had died and one had become estranged from him, he decided to leave both his house and the objects in it to the nation, so that people could see it and benefit from it. Boucher explains the long process that eventually brought Soane’s wishes to fruition and also sets Soane’s museum in the context of other museums of the time. It was not quite an enlightenment museum, with objects carefully catalogued and arranged by period or type. Neither was it exactly like the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that Renaissance dukes and princes liked to display. But in its diversity, its lavishness, the place it finds for the curious, the aesthetics of its arrangement, its ingenuity, it is more like the latter – hence the title of this fascinating, rich, and superbly illustrated book.

Plans and people

Richard Rogers with Richard Brown, A Place for All People
Published by Canongate Books

My next pre-Christmas review is an account of life, works, and beliefs by one of our foremost architects...

We tend to think of famous architects in terms of their most high-profile projects. Richard Rogers, one of the pre-eminent architects of his generation, brings to mind instantly major buildings like the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s Building in London. But there is much more to him than that, and this book – part memoir, part architectural inside story, part manifesto – tells the stories not just of these but also of many less well known designs, from his early houses to more recent social housing projects. All these have fascinating aspects, and it’s one of the pleasures of reading this book to discover more about familiar and unfamiliar buildings alike – what drove the designs, the thinking behind them, how they got built.

The book is revealing, as one would expect, on the architect’s formative experiences.His closeness to Italy is key – his Italian parents and cousin, the architect Ernesto Rogers, his admiration of Italian piazzas, his love of Florence, his work with Renzo Piano. There is also the formative influence of innovative architects in Britain, such as Peter Cook and Cedric Price, and in America, where his first experience of New York and his time at Yale are described. But history and historic architecture are important too, whether it’s the achingly beautiful piazza in Siena or the work of great Victorian engineers like Brunel or Paxton.

Then there’s the work. Rogers’ account of the various crises involved in getting the Pompidou Centre designed and built, and the controversies that surrounded Lloyd’s, are vividly told: it’s worth reading the book for these alone. A major theme is the development of adaptable buildings, and of lightweight structures, from the early Reliance Controls building near Swindon to the Millennium Dome, aka O2.

Another important leitmotif is public space. Rogers loves lively public spaces, especially those Italian squares. He not only promotes public space when he can, but actively encourages it and builds it into his plans – the piazza next to the Pompidou Centre is a key part of the design and Rogers and Piano’s was the only scheme for the site that provided this facility. He is exercised, quite rightly I think, by the poor provision of public space in some British cities and the erosion of this space as it gets sold off to private owners who let the public in on their own conditions. And he is particularly engaged by the spaces in capital cities. He believes that every Parliament should have a public space next to it for people to demonstrate ion, and finds it an embarrassment that Britain’s government sought to banish demonstrators from London’s Parliament Square.

A Place for All People, this book is called, and people are at its heart. Star that he is, Rogers is constantly at pains to credit his partners, co-designers, and engineers (he’s worked with some of the best of those), and to build up a picture of some of the ways in which a large architectural practice works. People’s importance to him is not just about socialising in the River Café or enjoying big family get-togethers in his enviable London house. People are at the core of what he does and understanding that offers a way of understanding Rogers and his remarkable buildings.