Soane and Modernism: Make It New

12 February – 18 May 2025, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Curated by Dr. Erin McKellar

*Soane and Modernism: Make it New* at the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Photo: Gareth Gardener.

Opening 12 February, Sir John Soane’s Museum will present Soane and Modernism: Make it New, the first exhibition to investigate Soane as a forerunner of architectural modernism. This exhibition brings together drawings from Soane’s collection, some on display for the first time, in dialogue with works lent by Drawing Matter, including drawings by celebrated modernists including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos and Ernő Goldfinger.

Structured around core modernist architectural ideals, such as light and space and modularity, Soane and Modernism draws attention to the characteristics shared by Soane and the architects that came after him. Le Corbusier deployed inventive lighting systems for his museum at Chandigarh, which innovatively used daylight to illuminate works of art, as Soane did at Dulwich Picture Gallery. At Pitzhanger Manor, Soane’s use of juxtaposed materials and textures to create the gated entrance draws similarities to the way in which Frank Lloyd Wright combined and used natural materials. As such, Soane’s designs can be considered a forerunner for many of the architectural principles that were adopted in the twentieth century.

Soane’s designs not only foreshadowed some of twentieth century’s most iconic buildings. In 1816, Soane designed a tomb for his wife, Eliza, who died in November 1815: an upright double cube, surrounded by four piers and topped with a shallow dome. More than a century later, Giles Gilbert Scott, a Trustee of the Soane Museum, proposed a design for a telephone box that would be placed on the streets throughout Britain, reflecting many of the elements of Soane’s original design. A drawing of the 1935 ‘Jubilee kiosk’ in the exhibition recalls Soane’s pared-down form of classicism, with a box structure topped with Soane’s characteristic ‘canopy’.

Office of Pierre Jeanneret, section, Chandigarh Museum, India, 1963. Pencil, colour pencil, ink and three stencilled Modular, 612 × 921 mm. DMC 1362.

Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960), Elevation, Jubilee K6 kiosk, 1935. Numerous in pencil, 317 × 190 mm. DMC 3198.1.

The exhibition will also investigate two more recent case studies which share affinities with Soane’s work: Álvaro Siza’s Bouça Social Housing in Porto, Portugal, and Tony Fretton’s Lisson Gallery in London. Fretton turned to Soane for inspiration in overcoming the challenge of adapting adjoining domestic buildings and ensuring that light was able to penetrate throughout. Soane and Siza arrived independently at a solution of using the corner of the Bank of England and the Bouça housing development, respectively, as an urban focal point. Later, when visiting the Soane Museum, Siza celebrated Soane’s drawings of the Tivoli Corner at the Bank of England. These case studies reveal how drawings help architects to resolve issues in order to arrive at solutions that are at the forefront of architectural thinking.

The drawings loaned to the exhibition from the Drawing Matter Collection can be viewed here (requires registration/logging-in to the catalogue). Read a text on each drawing, here.