(Copyright Hugh Pearman/The Sunday Times: an updated version of the article published in The Sunday Times, August 29, 1999 as "Thanks, Sir John, we've seen the light")
How can a Georgian architect and avid Freemason, much obsessed by death, influence what is built in our towns and cities today? What is the strange power of Sir John Soane, 18th century hod-carrier turned 19th century master architect and academic, that he is routinely cited and copied by modern architects who are neither classicists, doom-merchants, nor (so far as one can tell) Masons? But such is the case, and the public has taken to him too. Soane, who died in 1837, is now so popular that his little museum in London - originally his house - is overrun with more than 100,000 visitors a year and is about to launch an appeal for funds to expand. A new book on Soane by Gillian Darley has just been published. And the first big exhibition on him has opened at the Royal Academy in London.
Soane did not build all that much, and still less survives, yet his peculiarly mystic vision is all around us. The familiar red British telephone kiosk with its saucer-dome roof, originally designed in the 1920s by Giles Gilbert Scott, is a straight rip-off of two Soane mausolea - one he designed for himself and his family, and another related one he designed as part of his Dulwich Picture gallery. Make a call from one of those kiosks, and you are entering the house of death.
|
|
Telecommunications mausolea
|
