Soane and Modernism: Make it New review – red phone boxes, Sydney Opera House and a prophet of modern architecture

The Guardian

16-02-2025

If John Soane had only created the combined house and museum that bears his name in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London – a domestic-scaled pharaoh's tomb with Alice in Wonderland tricks of scale and perception – his place in history would be assured. But he did far more. There, and in his building for Dulwich Picture Gallery, he helped to form the modern idea of a museum. His (mostly destroyed) headquarters for the Bank of England brought the serene grandeur and spatial complexity of imperial Roman baths to the workplace of financial civil servants. The son of a bricklayer who became one of Britain's most original architects, his restless imagination generated a trove of ideas that others still mine, two centuries after he lived and worked.
After a period of relative neglect after his death in 1837 aged 83, his work began to be rediscovered in the 1920s. The best-known homage is the classic red telephone box, its shallow dome and reeded decoration frankly borrowed by its architect, Giles Gilbert Scott, from the tomb that Soane created for his wife and himself in Old St Pancras churchyard in London. Versions of the top-lit vaults he designed in Dulwich can be seen in art galleries all over the world. But most of all, according to a new exhibition at his house and museum, he was a prophet of the modernist architecture of the 20th century.
'People now,' says the show's curator, Erin McKellar, 'don't realise how new Soane was.' His life spanned a 'period of tremendous change', from the mid-18th century into the era when railways and photography were beginning to emerge. He both responded to circumstances and developed ideas that were ahead of his time. He pared back ornament, in at least some of his work, stripping it to essentials in ways you could call modern.
The exhibition pairs drawings by Soane and his office, mostly from the museum's collections, with material by 20th-century giants – Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernö Goldfinger, Le Corbusier, the brutalist pioneers Alison and Peter Smithson. There's a drawing of the elegant Kingsgate Bridge in Durham by the engineer Ove Arup, and a beautiful wooden triptych by the architect of the Sydney Opera House, Jørn Utzon, in which the building's curving roofs emerge from the surfaces of a sphere. This object, an artwork as much as an architectural model, was made to demonstrate the geometric principles of this now famous building.
The exhibits by 20th-century architects have been loaned by Drawing Matter, an astonishingly rich private collection of drawings and models. Here they are organised by McKellar into themes – light and space, engineering – that show the continuity of Soane's ideas into modernism. A two-storey conservatory he proposed for his country house, Pitzhanger Manor, in Ealing, gridded and glassy, it is matched with a similarly measured and transparent design by Goldfinger. The flint and brick gateway of the same house, whose effect comes from the contrasting textures of its raw and cooked materials more than from decoration, is linked to 'Eaglefeather' a dynamic stone-and-timber house cantilevered over a Malibu slope by Frank Lloyd Wright and his genius apprentice John Lautner. There's a drawing of Scott's phone box.
The case for Soane's modernism is not in fact fully made, partly because space doesn't allow it, but more because he was too singular and multifarious to be put in any one category. He could equally be claimed as an ancestor for postmodernism, the movement that saw itself as the colourful antidote to the austerity of the likes of Goldfinger or the Smithsons, or for 20th-century versions of classical architecture, which was more Gilbert Scott's camp. One of the strongest exhibits is an 'urban scene' of 1978 by the Italian Aldo Rossi, a composition of triangles, cubes and cylinders based on his own projects, whose use of simple forms might be compared to Soane's. But it's a stretch to call Rossi, who sought to reinvent the monumental types of antiquity, a modernist.
The truth is that Soane was an inventor and a creator, seeking incessantly and sometimes anxiously to innovate, with too many ideas in his head and in his drawing hand for any one style or movement. He had a magpie mind, and dreams of imperial scale. Architects of all kinds like him for the importance he gave to aspects you might call architectural – structure, materials, the use of light, the planning of spaces – over stylistic add-ons. What connects him most with the successors shown in the exhibition is a desire to explore and test the possibilities of their art with drawings and models.
So the exhibition works partly as a series of intriguing suggestions as to what might link Soane and modernists. It works best as an occasion for celebrating the acts of architectural drawing, the magic by which pen strokes become masonry. This is evident in its second room, in which sheets of sketches by the contemporary British architect Tony Fretton and the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza are juxtaposed with Soane's. These are examples of visible thinking, in which elements are worked over and over and one drawing is laid on top of another, with a coherent physical object slowly emerging from the mess. All of which, really, is architecture.
Soane and Modernism: Make It New is at the Sir John Soane's Museum, London, until 18 May