Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.There is a drawing in the new exhibition at London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum of the rear of his country home, Pitzhanger Manor, dating from 1810. It is, frankly, a little shocking. Not in its extravagance, or its fancy Regency flourishes, but for its minimal modernity. Soane designed an extension entirely in glass that looks not a million miles from the designs of the Bauhaus more than a century later. All that gives it away is the delicate cast mouldings in the ironwork mullions.The exhibition, Soane and Modernism: Make It New, posits Soane as a proto-Modernist, an architect who foreshadowed the aesthetics of the 20th century from the beginning of the 19th. Certainly Soane’s incredible house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields always feels oddly relevant. You could argue that you can find in Soane almost whatever you like: minimalism; proto-postmodern detail and theory; incredible clutter. His house contains all the contradictions of humanity, its urges to collect and remember, the tension between display and domesticity, between theatre and comfort.Soane (1753-1837) was a man from a modest background, the son of a bricklayer, who rose against the odds to become the greatest and most inventive architect of his era, designing the Bank of England, major interventions at the Houses of Parliament and the Law Courts, Britain’s first public art gallery in Dulwich and working on more than a hundred country houses. But he is best known today for his own house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which he spent three decades rebuilding and revising from 1792 and which he bequeathed to the nation as a museum through an act of parliament in 1833. One of the exhibits in the new show is a drawing of the familiar red phone kiosk by architect Giles Gilbert Scott (best known as the designer of Battersea and Bankside Power Stations, the latter now Tate Modern). The reason it is here is that it was inspired by Soane’s design for his wife’s tomb, still standing in St Pancras Old Church Gardens. The resemblance is obvious in the two architects’ designs, shown here side by side. It eloquently illustrates how a 20th-century architect working in a (more or less) modern idiom turned to Soane to inspire an entirely new type of building for a modern type of communication — and found it. You can find anything in Soane, if you look hard enough.“We wanted to show Soane as a forerunner of Modernism, a maverick,” says the exhibition’s curator Erin McKellar. “Influence can be very hard to prove but we can see how Soane was doing [Modernist] things in architecture well before Modernism.” One of Soane’s innovations was his use of interconnecting spaces, which now looks very modern indeed. He created complexity in intimate spaces, so that there were always glimpses of other rooms. Perhaps the most famous works in his home are the “Picture Planes” of the Picture Room, a series of pages that open out like a book to display his canvases and which finally open out on to the atrium. It is like peeling layers of art until you reach the ultimate work of art itself — the house.His house contains all the contradictions of humanity, its urges to collect and remember, the tension between display and domesticity, between theatre and comfortThe exhibition juxtaposes drawings by Soane with those of modern architects including Aldo Rossi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Álvaro Siza, Alison and Peter Smithson and Le Corbusier. British architect Tony Fretton’s sketchbook shows his designs for London’s Lisson Gallery (1992), one of the absolute great small London buildings. In it you can see how Fretton drew the oculus at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in thinking how to display and illuminate art.Soane became a little forgotten in the 19th century, but since the 1920s, architects have been irresistibly drawn back to him. The house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in particular — with its densely packed interior landscape of art and fragments of earlier civilisations, cornucopia of plaster details and stone busts, classical sculptures and archaeological remains — creates a vertical section not only through space but through time.His modernity stems from an attitude to the interior as an expression of a life lived with books, ideas and things. That his house would have once been a kind of showroom is in itself an extremely modern-day conceit. This house, seemingly made for an age of social media moments, with its photogenic fragments and complex layers, is both highly intimate and perfectly formed for showing off. Few architects can embody the preoccupations of their time and transcend them so fully. Soane is modern now, and, I suggest, he always will be.Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
