Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Classicism in England: John Soane’s Language and Imagination

Abstract

From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, British architecture had slipped into a widely acknowledged malaise brought on by the effects of increasing currents of secularisation and commercialisation. Ornaments from classical architecture were used, regardless of the meanings and functions of buildings, as merely arbitrary signs. John Soane (1753–1837), architect and the Royal Academy Professor of Architecture, was a major critical voice. Typifying the Enlightenment spirit, Soane considered the crisis of architecture as a language problem, resulting in the modern deviation from ancient principles – a problem which, he believed, could be solved only by a “return” to origins, by “referring to first principles and causes.” Soane never clearly stated what the ancient or first principles were. What we do know, though, is that Soane’s designs did not maintain the classical tradition. His work was revolutionary – the picturesque interiors, the simple architectural details, as well as his approaches to representation (collection and display), all had no precedent and in various ways, as claimed by modern scholars, they prophesied the architecture of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus. This chapter aims to shed light on the paradox of Soane’s rebellious architectural language as an experiment to regenerate the classical language, or a “return” to the origins, through detailed consideration of an unpublished manuscript on his house-museum entitled Crude Hints towards an History of my House in L[incoln’s] I[nn] Fields.