Soane's own house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, noted the great German classicist Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1826, had interiors like a sequence of cemeteries and catacombs. He was right: even today, what is now the Soane Museum, claustrophobically jammed with its maker's relics of antiquity, can send a shiver down the spine.

J.M. Gandy painting of the heart of Soane's house by candlelight

But Soane's Stygian side is not what primarily interests today's architects. What fascinates them is quite the opposite: his masterly handling of light and space. Nobody since Soane - and arguably nobody before him, save perhaps the brooding Nicholas Hawksmoor a century earlier - has managed to manipulate light with such dexterity. The best Soane buildings draw in daylight from a myriad of sources, mostly indirect, mostly from above. These washes of light are then often bounced around via artfully-placed convex mirrors, some no bigger than ping-pong balls. Rooms open up into other rooms via opening panels or unexpected windows. Colours are intense. The sensation is of being underground, or in a cave, yet with indirect contact to the open air. It is as if Soane set out to create reverse Platonic worlds within his buildings, artificial environments of supreme elegance in which the clamour and movement of the brutish outside world is muted and filtered. And because Soane was above all concerned with interior architecture, his exteriors gradually became more and more austere, until eventually their classical decorations were scraped away to the minimum.

No wonder the Victorians hated him (Pugin was particularly vitriolic) and today's ornament-shy architects love him. And his life story has real drama. While most architects are from the professional set, Soane was from the working classes, the son of a country bricklayer who by the age of 15 was working as a building-site labourer. Had he not been discovered by a visiting London architect who got him into the Royal Academy schools where he blossomed, world architecture in the 20th century would have taken a somewhat different and unknowable course. Even then, had he not made a good marriage, had he not had the introduction through a friend to work on the house of the prime minister, the younger William Pitt, he might never have made it. Later in life, he suffered from King Lear syndrome as his son George violently attacked him - anonymously but identifiably - in print. Soane disowned him, and - so it is said - refused a baronetcy that his son would later inherit. The masonic business spoils the plotline somewhat by today's standards, but a fascination with mystic symbolism informed his architecture just as much as it imbued Mozart's The Magic Flute at the same period: that's the way things were in the 1790s.