Individual Architects, Designers, & Planners, Palladianism & Neo-Classicism Architecture, Architects - Biography
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the most influential and original of all English architects. In this illustrated biography, Gillian Darley places Soane's life and buildings side by side, and her insights into this complex man and his turbulent life add a great deal to our understanding of his extraordinary work.. "Born the son of a bricklayer, Soane was a self-made man, egotistic, irascible, with encyclopaedic interests. He built himself a remarkable town house that he filled with treasures and left in trust to the nation. By 1800 he was rich and successful, designing both private houses for powerful clients and public works, Consummate at securing patronage, he was the personal architect to two prime ministers. He was architect to the Bank of England, to Chelsea Hospital and to the United Grand Lodge of Freemasons. He designed Dulwich Picture Gallery - the first purpose-built art gallery in Britain.. "Soane made unprecedented use of neoclassical elements to provide theatrical and unexpected conjunctions and remarkable spatial effects. His dramatic and unpredictable buildings have increasingly proved an inspiration to architects of many schools.Editorials
Choice
[Darley] now offers the first complete biography of the architect, including a discussion of his many character defects and horrible relations with his children and other relatives, ignored or suppressed by earlier writers. . . . It is a complete study of [Sloane's] life. . . . General readers; upper-division undergraduate and graduate students.Patrick Taylor-Martin
Darley is a sensitive explorer of the Soanian mentality and she makes shrewd and intelligent links between the often troubled life and those masterly and she makes shrewd and intelligent links between the often troubled life and those masterly and haunting buildings.Peter Ackroyd
An exhaustive, if dutiful, account of Soane's life, in which all his work and peripheral activity is precisely described. . . . The narrative is absorbing.— (The Times (London))
The New Yorker
This great architect's work has such compelling immediacy that it feels contemporary—like the painting of his friend Turner—so it is astonishing to discover that for more than a century after his death, in 1837, Soane was out of fashion. Darley's meticulous biography shows Soane, who was born in poverty, rising to wealth and fame in a period when architecture was defining itself as a profession.J. Duncan Berry
It is one of the great accomplishments of Gillian Darley's new biography that the full scope of Soane's life and works can be seen in exquisite detail, thus allowing a fresh perspective on this vexing figure and his ethereal aesthetic objectives.The New Criterion
Book Details
Published
August 1, 2000
Publisher
Yale University Press
Pages
368
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780300086959