Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

GO NOT TO GRAVEYARDS

It is a Time Machine, it is a vestibule, it is a basement, it is a garret, it is an immense garage sale of history. And it is, finally, the three- or four-level tombstone monument to one of the orneriest architectural geniuses of the nineteenth century.

Look beyond this paragraph. Gaze upon my favorite museum in all of London.

I have used Soane’s digs as my letterhead for some fifteen years. New friends or fans, writing across country, ask, with some excitement, if that is my home, my stately mansion.

Oh, my soul, how I wish it were.

I would live in those upper stories…

To be buried in that basement!

You see that Egyptian tomb, lower left? That’s it. File me there, with bread and onions, for eternity!

But, no, the place is not mine. It belonged and still belongs to the spirit of soaring dreamer and super-crank, John Soane, who rebuilt London in his lantern mind, then stepped forth to rebuild the real. It so affected me, on my first visit in 1969, that I wrote:

Why do I go on in this fashion about Soane?

Because most of you, driving or walking about London, have passed within a few paces of Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields without sensing you were nearly onto a tall narrow cubbyhole of genius.

While you were busy fending elbows and exhausting your midsummer patience at the National Gallery or the Tate, I was walking, cool and solitary, through the levels of John Soane’s archaeological finds, his Time Machine of collectibles.

The test comes, of course, in that moment when standing amidst this fantastic rummage sale of centuries, one thinks: What would I steal first?!

Everything!

So it is with Soane’s basement-tombyard, uppertower stash-bin environment. You wish to live and die there. A pretty rash decision.

During a very long lifetime, Soane was professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and was commissioned to design the Bank Stock Office, the Rotunda at the Bank, and other large public buildings. These included the Law Courts, The Privy Council Offices, as well as the King’s Robing room and the Royal Academy of the House of Lords.

But the heart soars and cracks when viewing his plans for a Triumphal Bridge, a dream construction of such high imagination that it won Soane the Gold Medal of the Royal Academy when he was only twenty-three years old.

And all the while he lived out his crustacean life in the accreted shell which was his mansion, his museum, and a mausoleum for dead things, which come alive as you pass.

Most of what he sketched up, line by line and stone by stone, has long since been demolished, a process whereby the ugly replaced the beautiful or halfway-decently handsome. What war could not do, pismire ant men with their unfeeling antennae took apart at an architectural picnic some few decades ago. Soane’s marble children now lie with Piranesi’s rubble.

All the more dreadfully apt because upstairs, there on the right, find the gallery where Piranesi’s Prisons and Roman Stone Gardens are closeted. There also find Hogarth’s wicked-fox, mean-otter, poisonous ginmill bum-catchers and pox-collectors, who ferment in unsocial gatherings. Hogarth’s maniac idiots might well have brought Soane down, if they had been on-scene and he had barred their way.

There is a splendid architectural monograph published in 1983 by the Academy Editions of St. Martin’s Press, which should afford you the opportunity to meet this amazing spirit. There you will find the work of his incredibly evocative collaborator/illustrator J.M. Gandy. His pictorials are breathtaking in their color, light and shadow.

But two problems arise. One glance through the book is enough to make you Concorde off to London: an expensive compulsion, but understandable. The second problem, as I have said, is more serious: most of the glorious architectures dreamed by Soane and so capably delineated and colored by Gandy are long since vanished.

The final reward is, of course, the Museum itself, where Soane’s Athens-and-Rome, pretending to be London, live on. Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields will be around to the end of our century and long after. This being true, allow me to end my article with a last quote from that poem written eighteen years ago after my first encounter with that vertical tombyard: