The surprising joys of architectural drawings
Hidden Masterpieces
When Sir John Soane – architect of the Bank of England and collector extraordinaire – died in 1837, he had something like 30,000 architectural drawings tucked into various albums and drawers inside his London home, now a house museum. In the intervening years, fewer than 200 have ever been out on display, so a new exhibition of them is significant, not least because they remain in terrific condition.
Soane, the son of a bricklayer who won the Royal Academy’s prestigious gold medal for architecture at 23, is a deeply fascinating character – one I like a little bit more each time I encounter him. In the current show, which extends over two sepulchrally lit rooms on the first floor, we learn that, during the Napoleonic wars (1803-1815) when the coffers of Soane’s by-then widely renowned architectural practice ran frantically low, he refrained from laying off a single member of his staff. Not only that, but when he needed drawings for his lectures (he was elected the RA’S professor of architecture in 1806), he paid them from his own pocket. They turned out nearly a thousand, so the cost would have been substantial.
Some of these lecture drawings are on display here, including a play of fancy that overlays 10 buildings on top of one another in a series of coloured washes, to illustrate their scales: so St Peter’s in Rome looms over, for instance, the Radcliffe Library in Oxford and the Rotunda at the Bank of England. Soane was surveyor of the latter for 45 years, and in that time replaced almost every room – turn around and you’ll see a minutely detailed god’s eye drawing of the campus in its entirety. Its attention to light and shadow is quite beautiful, stressing just how thin the boundary between architecture and sculpture really is.
In among works from Soane’s architectural office are masterworks from the greatest names of architecture, each judiciously selected to hint at the collection’s excellence: a capriccio – architectural fantasy – by Giovanni Battista Piranesi from 1745-50; works by architects such as William Chambers and Robert Adam (the latter’s 1776 design for a state bed at Osterley Park, more cake than furniture and a gorgeous eau de nil green, is a must-see), and a handsome Book of Hours dating from c1512 that contains the earliest known drawing of a building under construction.
Throughout, I was repeatedly tickled by the ways in which artists had tried to enliven their building. In a c1550 drawing of the Colosseum in Rome, tiny stick men flit in and out of the arches (some so vigorously they might be jiving), while in a colour drawing from 1806 of the Temple of Neptune at Paestum, Italy, members of a gang of knickerbocker-clad boors flop over, and pose for each other among the columns.
I will say that with only 22 works, the show is small. It is hard not to feel that one is only just warming to the theme when, abruptly, the fun stops. The wall labels, too, dwell excessively on how the drawings came into the collection.
These are minor gripes though. Really, if you were in any doubt that architectural drawings are fertile terrain for beauty, wit and poetic invention, here’s the evidence that proves otherwise.