ABSTRACT
On John Soane’s death in 1837, his house at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London
was a hybrid organization: a domestic residence, an expression of cultivation
and taste, a museum and archive, a space of amusement (a collection of faux
period rooms and a theatre of effect and atmosphere), a teaching collection
and apprentice’s studio, an architectural office, a model townhouse, a cenotaph,
and, finally, a public monument. The house had been bequeathed to the British
public four years previously by an Act of Parliament, a gift that in part stemmed
from Soane’s aspirations to posthumous fame. The failure of Soane’s biological
heirs to live up to his expectations prompted him to create a material legacy
of art and architectural culture for his future architectural progeny, collapsing
the archive as cultural legacy with the cenotaph as public memorial by
transforming his private realm into a public space. Created to provide public
access to what The Sunday Times termed ‘the splendid realities redeemed
from decay and worthy of immortality’,1 the bequest of the house and its
considerable collections, which included over 60,000 drawings, formed a
cultural inheritance of Soane’s own work and that of those architects to whom
he had been indebted, and of the aesthetic theories and cultural trends the
house embodied.2
