A Thing of Beauty and a Joy Forever

Have you ever been to the Sir John Soane Museum in London? If you haven’t, you should. It’s well worth a visit.

Sir John Soane (1753 – 1837) was quite a character. From humble beginnings he ultimately rose to became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, a great collector, and a truly wonderful architect whose famous works include Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Bank of England. His eponymous museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is perhaps his best-known work though. It’s a wonderfully eccentric, odd and utterly beguiling place full of rich, clever spaces, carefully controlled natural light and a huge array of incredible artefacts with every square inch used to display just about everything in the great’s man’s collection. It’s all slightly spooky too, in a good way. My wife and I visited earlier this year and, on arrival, the doorman enquired politely if we had visited before.

“About 35 years ago” I replied.

“Ah, well, I don’t think you’ll find it’s changed much sir”. He was right. It hadn’t, but it was just as fascinating.

Thomas Lawrence’s large portrait of Sir John hangs in the dining room and depicts an open, rather kindly demeanour, which is interesting because in reality the great man was apparently quite bonkers with (like many of the best architects) an ego the size of Jupiter. He was undeniably brilliant though; charismatic too, and a real party animal. When he had his newly acquired Seti Sarcophagus installed in the base of the top-lit, two-storey volume at the heart of the house, he organized a 3-day bender attended by, amongst others, JWM Turner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Duke of Sussex and the Prime Minister. Sounds like quite a party.

In the middle of this same space, gazing down on the enormously expensive Sarcophagus below, he modestly placed a wee bust of himself above that of some painter guy called Raphael and a sculptor by the name of Michelangelo. On the other hand, he was making a perfectly valid point about architects being the greatest of all artists which, naturally, it’s hard to disagree with. Oddly, amongst all the glorious visual cacophony, I couldn’t quite find the busts of all those early 19th century PM’s or QS’s, but they’re probably lurking in there somewhere.

The day we visited, the museum was also displaying some excellent work by Dublin based Grafton Architects, who are certainly serious contenders for the very best architects practicing anywhere in the world today. Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara and their team are really quite brilliant. Across the square from the Soane Museum, you’ll find their Marshall Building for the LSE, models and drawings of which were at that time on display in the Soane. The Marshall Building is staggeringly good architecture of the very first rank which is joyful, humbling and inspiring to visit, effortlessly displaying the same masterful control of material and light displayed by Sir John in his rather more modest abode nearby. There’s a lot less clutter too. Louis Kahn would have loved it. So did I.

I also loved the Isi Metzstein Memorial Lecture that Shelley and Yvonne gave at Edinburgh University in 2019. Architects often get accused of being arrogant and aloof but, believe it or not, that’s not always the case. Unlike Sir John, the complete lack of ego displayed by Shelley and Yvonne that day was quite remarkable, their empathetic, self-deprecating humour and intelligent insights animating a wonderful and thoroughly inspiring wander through their often astonishingly good portfolio packed full of assertive, confident architecture. I found that deeply satisfying, as were my subsequent visits to the Marshall Building, and the neighbouring Soane. There really is nothing quite like seeing truly great buildings by truly great architects, facilitated by truly great clients.

Projects where the architect has clearly taken centre stage are always obvious in the quality of the final outcome, whatever their scale, whatever their budget, and whichever era they have been designed in. We live in a complex collaborative construction industry today, where many people genuinely contribute to the success of the project, not least the client, but perhaps architects should blow our trumpets just a little bit more because, no matter the people involved and no matter the complexities of how things are procured, it is still, deep down, the architect who is always the fulcrum of the job; the conductor of the orchestra. And, with the right people involved, with the same common goal and the same common culture, sometimes the music that orchestra creates can last for centuries. A thing of beauty is, after all, a joy forever. One visit to the Soane Museum will show you that.