Home of John Soane
1792 1824
Breakfast Room © Derry Moore / Sir John Soane’s Museum
South Drawing Room © Derry Moore / Sir John Soane’s Museum
Soane's Bath Room © Gareth Gardner / Sir John Soane’s Museum
The Model Room © Gareth Gardner / Sir John Soane’s Museum
John Soane is the most unclassical of all the architects of Classicism, and his home itself is the strangest of all his creations. He gradually expanded the house as he bought up neighboring properties and reworked them. The result is a crowded and bewildering labyrinth of rooms of varying dimensions and shapes, oddly placed doors, shafts between floors and natural light streaming from unseen openings in every direction, including from below. Like every enlightened English gentleman of his time, Soane was a collector of antiques and paintings, and it was to house and display them that he kept adding new structures to the house. The displays so cover the walls of the tiny rooms that you can hardly pass through without bumping an ear or a nose into a Roman marble.
Dome Area © Derry Moore / Sir John Soane’s Museum
© Wikipedia
12-14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, England
Home of Schroeder Gerrit Rietveld
1924
Kim Zwarts © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pictoright Amsterdam
50 Prins Hendriklaan, Utrecht, Holland
© MidMod-Design
Gerrit Rietveld, the chief Dutch modernist architect, built this home for the widow Truus Schroeder-Schraeder and her three children, and lived there himself as well. It is often said that Rietveld and Truus Schroeder’s plan for the house is a three-dimensional realization of the principles of abstract painter Piet Mondrian. The house even more calls to mind the work of the Russian Suprematists—Malevich’s “arkhitektons” and Lissitzky’s “prouns.” What it certainly does not look like is the “normal” modernist house: too much color, too many details unrelated to function. Nonetheless, it is the predecessor of the modernist house. The Schroeder house is one of the daring early experiments on which the architecture of modernism was built.
Kim Zwarts © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pictoright Amsterdam
Gerrit Rietveld: The Architect and Designer © Phaidon Press
