John Soane
John Soane designed the Bank of England and his own house in London, which he made into a museum. He reduced classical forms to lines and planes and worked with hidden light in a way that points towards modernism.
John Soane was born in 1753 in Goring-on-Thames, the son of a bricklayer. At fifteen he found a place with the architect George Dance the Younger and then with Henry Holland. He studied at the Royal Academy and in 1776 won a gold medal that gave him a travelling scholarship. He travelled in Italy in 1778–1780, where he studied the ancient ruins and met Piranesi. Back in England he first built country houses and smaller houses before being appointed architect to the Bank of England in 1788.
For almost fifty years Soane rebuilt and extended the Bank of England into a huge complex with halls lit from above through domes and lanterns. He designed Dulwich Picture Gallery, one of the first public art galleries in England, with skylights in every room. His own house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields became a laboratory of rooms, light and mirrors and a museum for his collections. He was professor of architecture at the Royal Academy from 1806 and gave lectures with large illustrations.
Soane died in 1837, having ensured that his house would be preserved as a museum. The Bank of England was largely demolished in the 1920s, a loss often described as one of the greatest in London’s architectural history. His simplified classicism, in which ornament becomes incised lines and walls become planes, has been seen as a forerunner of modernism. His way of bringing light in from above and letting rooms open onto one another has been studied by architects right up to our own time.