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

12-14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, England

John Soane

© Wikipedia

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

Home of Schroeder Gerrit Rietveld

1924

Kim Zwarts © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pictoright Amsterdam

Gerrit Rietveld

© 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.

50 Prins Hendriklaan, Utrecht, Holland

Kim Zwarts © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pictoright Amsterdam

Gerrit Rietveld: The Architect and Designer © Phaidon Press

Home of Konstantin Melnikov

1927      1929

 

Studio

 

Living room

Hallway © All photos by Igor Palmin

10 Krivoarbatsky Lane, Moscow, Russia

Konstantin Melnikov

All 20th-century architects built homes for themselves, all except Soviet architects, in whose country stand-alone residences ran against the powerful Socialist tide. How Melnikov managed to evade these constraints is a mystery and our good fortune that providence happened to smile on this wildest of all the dreamers of the Soviet avant-garde. The home is made up of two cylinders with honeycombed walls and a single bedroom for the entire family. The house is an architectural masterpiece, is celebrated worldwide and is one of the top attractions for foreign tourists to Moscow. But, for Russians, it is important not so much as an architectural wonder but as a cultural anomaly: a single-family home built during the era of the accursed “apartment question” with the inscription, “Konstantin Melnikov architect”, proudly displayed over the entrance and with an enormous, bright, cathedral-like studio on the third floor, all of it bespeaking Melnikov’s pride in a profession little recognized in the USSR, whose members were treated as anonymous functionaries of design institutes and slaves of the building industry.

 

Living room © All photos by Igor Palmin