The Production Sites of Architecture

Sophia Psarra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351363327
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Production Sites of Architecture examines the intimate link between material sites and meaning. It explores questions such as: how do spatial configurations produce meaning? What are alternative modes of knowledge production? How do these change our understanding of architectural knowledge?

Featuring essays from an international range of scholars, the book accepts that everything about the production of architecture has social significance. It focuses on two areas: firstly, relationships of spatial configuration, form, order and classification; secondly, the interaction of architecture and these notions with other areas of knowledge, such as literature, inscriptions, interpretations, and theories of classification, ordering and invention. Moving beyond perspectives which divide architecture into either an aesthetic or practical art, the authors show how buildings are informed by intersections between site and content, space and idea, thought and materiality, architecture and imagination.

Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects and artists including Amale Andraos, Dan Wood, OMA, Koen Deprez and John Soane, The Production Sites of Architecture makes a major contribution to our understanding of architectural theory.

Part I

Imagination

1

A monument to a ruin

Jonathan Hill

Monuments to great men

Architects, especially significant ones, tend to write, draw and publish as well as build, acknowledging an interdependent web of production sites that have together stimulated creative architectural development for over 500 years. This chapter investigates the constructive dialogue between the homes that John Soane characterised as ‘eternal’ and ‘temporary’, respectively his tomb and his house-museum at 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the designs that he displayed there, and his novelistic Crude Hints towards a History of My House in L(incoln’s) I(nn) Fields, 1812.¹

The catalyst to the dialogue between Soane’s two homes was a death. John and Eliza Soane assisted their younger son, George, when he had financial difficulties. But on his imprisonment for debt and then fraud in 1812 and 1814, they refused to assist, hoping that the experience would modify his behaviour. However, George further offended his parents by publishing two anonymous newspaper articles in September 1815 in which he mocked their home and its architect, his father:

The exterior, from its exceeding heaviness and monumental gloom, seems as if it were intended to convey a satire upon himself; it looks like a record of the departed, and can only mean that considering himself as deficient in that part of humanity—the mind and its affections—he has reared this mausoleum for the enshrinement of his body.²

Shown the letters by her husband on 10 October 1815, Eliza responded: ‘These are George’s doings – he has given me my death blow – I shall never hold up my head again’.³ Just 53, Eliza died on 22 November 1815 with a burst gall bladder the cause of death. But Soane blamed his son, displaying the articles at Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a carved inscription: ‘Death Blows given by George Soane/10th & 24th Sept. 1815’.

The Enlightenment’s concern for origins and memorials instilled in Soane an appreciation of ancient precedents in tomb design, as in all architectural matters. Although ancient Romans did not allow mausoleums in their houses, they believed that their ancestors had done so. Following the death of the art collector Noel Desenfans in 1807, Soane designed a small mausoleum to the rear of 38 Charlotte, now Hallam, Street, in London.⁴ Dated 1808, design sketches for 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields refer to ‘catacombs’ and a ‘mausoleum’ in the basement. But rather than incorporate Eliza’s tomb into their house, Soane chose a public site on the edge of London.

The roads leading into ancient Rome were lined with tombs; famously along the Via Appia, which Giovanni Battista Piranesi evocatively depicted in the frontispiece to the second volume of Antichità romane, 1756–1757. Soane copied Piranesi’s illustration for his fourth lecture as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in 1810, and also admired Carlo Labruzzi’s Via Appia illustrata ab urbe Roma ad Capuam, 1794.⁵ Soane was equally influenced by eighteenth-century French architectural theorists. In the section entitled ‘Monuments to the Honour of Great Men’ in Observations sur l’architecture, 1765, Marc-Antoine Laugier argues that tombs should be in public view, not in churches. He further remarks that ‘mausolea offer a rich field for the imagination of artists’ because they have few design restrictions. In Livre d’architecture, 1745, Germain Boffrand asserts that the character of a mausoleum ‘must be treated appropriately to its subject and with a type of architecture and decoration that must be serious and sad’.⁶ At the time, a grand monument to an architect was uncommon, but Soane aimed to memorialise himself twice over, realising that a tomb glorifies the architect and the interred, and knowing he would be buried alongside his wife.

His home was in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, which, due to its overcrowded churchyard, had acquired an additional burial ground on London’s northern periphery, adjacent to a road into the city, recalling ancient Roman precedent. Soane purchased two neighbouring plots, reflecting the scale of his ambition and protecting the tomb from demolition. ‘In Georgian London death was as hierarchical as life’, write Roger Bowdler and Christopher Woodward.⁷ The city’s growing population meant that the remains of the deceased were often exhumed to allow for new arrivals. Most graves lacked even a gravestone. Established churchyards already had several lavish tombs, but Soane’s tomb commanded the burial ground, which since its opening in 1802 had acquired just one chest-tomb and no other significant full-size tomb.

Soane began the design just three months after Eliza’s death, and construction commenced in April 1816. Defining the edges of the site, the balustrade is ornamented with details referring to ancient sarcophagi, including cherubs holding extinguished torches representing the end of life. The coffins rest in a subterranean vault capped with a heavy stone slab to deter grave robbers. The above-ground monument is modelled on the aedicula, a small ancient Roman shrine, typically with columns at its corners, and the diminutive of the Latin term aedēs, meaning a temple or dwelling. Many grand church monuments adopted this form, but its external use was rare. Soane’s tomb has two aediculae, one inside the other. The outer aedicula, in Portland stone, has Doric piers at its corners supporting a shallow dome, and protects the inner Carrara marble aedicula, which has Ionic columns at its corners supporting a pediment on each façade. In turn, the inner aedicula safeguards a double cube monolith, also in Carrara marble, which was rarely used externally because it weathered poorly in London’s polluted atmosphere. The pale outer Portland stone contrasts with, and safeguards, the pure white inner marble – a house within a house – as Soane symbolically protected his wife’s memory. The monolith has epitaphs to Soane, his wife and elder son, John, on the south, east and west elevations respectively. The north face is blank, as George is not buried there.

Most likely a Deist who believed that God left the natural world in trust to humanity, Soane eschewed Christian symbolism in the design of his tomb and other mausolea. Uniting the last house and the first, Soane’s tomb recalls Vitruvius’s primitive hut, especially Laugier’s idealised version – four tree-trunks supporting a pediment of branches – in the frontispiece to the 1755 second edition of Essai sur l’architecture, 1753.⁸ The shallow dome may be modelled on an ancient Roman cinerary urn, and its sides are incised with a wavy line representative of eternity and sometimes associated with Freemasonry.⁹ Surmounting the dome, the small circular drum has coiled around its circumference a serpent swallowing its tail, which is a symbol of eternity termed an ouroboros. The finial completing the tomb is a pineapple, an emblem of regeneration often seen on Roman cinerary urns. In his fourth lecture, alongside a majestic illustration, Soane remarked: ‘The Mausoleum of Hadrian, built during his lifetime, was the most magnificent sepulchral monument of all antiquity’ and ‘finished with a pineapple of bronze’.¹⁰

As well as design drawings and work-in-progress sketches, Soane arranged for his assistants to depict the tomb in a number of imaginary landscape settings. He acknowledged classical antiquity as an invaluable model, but criticised the literal transfer of architecture from one place to another and emphasised the importance of local conditions such as culture, climate and site.¹¹ In his tenth lecture, Soane identifies gardening as an exception to the general superiority of ‘the ancients over the moderns’. Discussing a building and its setting, he remarks: ‘Architecture being thus identified with gardening, it becomes a necessary part of the education of the architect that he shall be well acquainted with the principles of modern decorative landscape gardening.’¹² Soane was indebted to early eighteenth-century gardens – notably those of William Kent, describing him as ‘the father of modern gardening’ – and to the late eighteenth-century theories of Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, as well as to novels such as Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1759–1767, which uses a picturesque, fragmented and meandering narrative to engage the reader.¹³

Soane acquired Price’s An Essay on the Picturesque, 1794, the year it was published, influencing his sixth and ninth lectures. Emphasising time as a means to identify differences between aesthetic categories, Price equates beauty with youth and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction : Architecture as a many-part system
• Part I Imagination
• Part II Worldmaking
• Part III Mediations
• Part IV Intersections
• Part V Re-appropriations
• Index