ABSTRACT

Looking at the history of architecture since the Renaissance, it is evident that the production of knowledge in the discipline has not just occurred through building. Architects, especially influential ones, write and draw as well as build. A web of interdependent influences among these practices have stimulated architectural development for over 500 years. This chapter considers the evolving tradition of the interdependent art forms of the picturesque landscape, analytical history, and the English novel in the work of John Soane. In each of these art forms, the ruin – a hybrid of architecture and landscape, nature and culture – became a recurring model. More specifically, the chapter investigates the creative dialogue between Soane’s ‘eternal’ and ‘temporary’ homes, respectively his tomb and 12–14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields with its contents, and Soane’s novelistic history Crude Hints towards a History of My House in L(incoln’s) I(nn) Fields, 1812. Soane conceived his two ‘houses’ as monuments to himself. His ‘eternal house’ was designed so as to be timeless and unchanging. In contrast, his ‘temporary house’ was conceived and constructed as a ruin. Soane incorporated found and fabricated ruined elements alongside new ones thinking of the house as representative of the temporal, rather than the timeless. Preoccupied with death, he associated the ruin with mortal decay and the unchanging monument with the afterlife. Questioning familiar associations, he also conceived the monumental ruin as synonymous with the creativity of life itself and the production of new knowledge. To fully appreciate his work, it is necessary to acknowledge that architecture for him occurs through the imaginative function of the ruin, defined through the interdependence of fact and fiction, building, writing and drawing.