Soane, John
Entry updated 27 May 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1753-1837) UK architect and author, active in the first capacity from the early 1770;, now perhaps best known for his forty-five years with the Bank of England, for which he served as architect and builder of its paradigm headquarters (demolished in the twentieth century). Along with earlier paintings by Joseph Gandy (1771-1843), he commissioned "A Bird's-eye View of the Bank of England" (1830), which depicts the bank in ruins at some point in the moderately distant future (see Ruins and Futurity); the working assumption in this encyclopedia, that what is here called Fantastika began in these years to become identifiably distinct, was in part inspired by this Iconic image.
Soane's interest in the rhetorical power of time-views had been made explicit decades earlier in "Crude Hints Towards the History of My House in L[incoln's] I[nn] Fields", a lightly fictionalized narrative drafted in 1812 but only published in Visions of Ruin: Architectural Fantasies and Designs for Garden Follies (anth 1999 chap) edited by Margaret Richardson. The story presents the bewildered examination of an early nineteenth century house under construction from the viewpoint of an architect writing from some point in the future. The home, at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, now houses the Sir John Soane's Museum. The tale, which seems not to have been circulated, could have had no immediate influence or imitators [but see again Ruins and Futurity for later, independently conceived instances of the topos it seems to have created, the most famous example being perhaps David MacAulay's Motel of the Mysteries (graph 1979)].
John Soane was knighted in 1831. [JC]
Sir John Soane
born Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire: 10 September 1753
died London: 20 January 1837
works (highly selected)
- "Crude Hints Towards the History of My House in L[incoln's] I[nn] Fields" in Visions of Ruin: Architectural Fantasies and Designs for Garden Follies (London: The Soane Gallery, 1999) edited by Margaret Richardson [nonfiction/fiction: chap: first written 1812: pb/Joseph Gandy]
links
about the author
- Gillian Darley, Gillian. John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999) [nonfiction: hb/Sir Thomas Lawrence]
- John Wilton-Ely. Piranesi Paestum & Soane (Munich, Germany: Pestel, 2013) [nonfiction: graph: illus/hb/from Giovanni Battista Piranesi]
links
previous versions of this entry