ABSTRACT
We’re deep in the Sir John Soane Museum, the house and office that Soane designed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It is dusk. In the Dome Room blue light filters down while candles cast a flickering light over relics of antiquity. These are the urns, statues, and fragments of buildings that are part of Soane’s collection, a dense encrustation covering almost every surface of the complex spatial configuration. More than mere decoration, this collection was Soane’s carefully constructed essay on the nature of architecture. Soane’s house was (and remains) something more than either the architecture or its contents; it is an argument for architecture, an experiment, and a pedagogical device all rolled into one.
