2015 marked the 20th anniversary of the annual Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation Traveling Fellowship, which since 1995 has enabled dozens of young scholars to travel to London to pursue research projects related to any aspect of Soane's work, his museum and its collections. We caught up with some of the fellows and asked them what they remembered most fondly about their experiences. These and more can be found online at www.soanefoundation.com/fellowship.
Angelo Maggi (2001, Edinburgh College of Art, architecture)
"The Soane Traveling Fellowship changed my life! I never start an architectural course without mentioning Sir John Soane and his contribution to the world of architecture. And, to remind me of this this daily, I have framed the Soane's Museum Foundation invitations from the various gala dinners in my office. One of them represents the façade of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the other one is the 2009 gala dinner card A JefferSoanian Evening." 2015: University IUAV of Venice, Associate Professor in Architectural History and History of Architectural Photography.
Sean Sawyer (1995, Columbia University, art history) – the first fellowship recipient.
"My fondest memory of my time as a Soane Traveling Fellow is of being welcomed to the daily staff tea break, held around a big table in Helen Dorey's office and presided over by Margaret Richardson when she was available. At first it was an intimidating affair, but soon I felt very much at home and a contributing member of the circle, who could debate the source of a molding profile in one breath and the merits of the latest films in the next." 2015: Royal Oak Foundation, Executive Director.
Terrance Galvin (1998, University of Pennsylvania, architecture)
"One of great memories took place in New York, actually, when I was giving the Soane Fellows Lecture on Soane and Joseph Michael Gandy's collaboration and the design of the Masonic skylight in the little dressing room. Afterward, an older man came up and asked me to look at what he had. He unwrapped a cloth with a piece of colored glass inside and said that when he was a boy in London during World War II, bombs had shattered the skylights in the Soane Museum -- his father had picked up a stained-glass shard from one of the shattered skylights from the Soane -- which he gave to him and he had saved all these years. He had treasured it all of his life and brought it to my lecture in New York, which he had seen advertised. Amazing!" 2015: Founding Director of the newest Canadian School of Architecture, the McEwen School of Architecture at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.
Nicholas Herman (2010, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, art history)
"While at the Soane, I had the pleasure of discovering Sir John's small but significant collection of illuminated manuscripts. Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly, given the quirkiness of 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields), the precious manuscripts were kept in a hallway cupboard! At the end of my stay, I had the pleasure of conducting a show-and-tell session with the museum staff. Even the director had never before seen some of the museum's glorious Books of Hours." 2015: Université de Montréal, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Art History and Film Studies.
Edward Wendt (1996 and 2002, Columbia University, art history and fine arts)
"My most treasured memory of my research at the Soane Museum is a collective memory—the opportunity to experience the house day after day as a sort of resident. Most mornings I would take the normal path fast up the stairs to the library, but often at lunchtime or the end of the day I would wander around, if only for a few minutes, so I got to know the spaces under many different conditions, atmospheric and otherwise." 2015: Workshop, a Brooklyn-based design firm specializing in residential projects, art spaces and furniture design; Pratt Institute, Visiting Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Architecture.
Michael J. Waters (2009, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, art history)
The Fellowship was instrumental to my work on Renaissance architectural treatises and works on paper, yielding a number of new discoveries that confirmed some of my broader hypotheses. It also gave me the rare opportunity to examine closely the same objects multiple times, especially the Codex Coner. Overall, I think my favorite memory was exploring the museum alone when it was closed on Mondays. It is an experience I will never forget." 2015: Scott Opler Junior Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, University of Oxford.
Daniel Abramson (1997, Connecticut College, art history)
"My keenest memory of the Soane Traveling Fellowship is of being able to reside at the museum in the scholar's apartment on the top floor and thus having after-hours access to the collection of drawings and documents related to the Bank Stock Office." 2015: Tufts University, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture and Art History; Director of Architectural Studies.
Bryan Boyer (2005, Harvard University, architecture)
"There's 2015here better in London than the Soane Museum to spend a quiet morning. I enjoyed the chance to linger completely alone, thinking, measuring, and drawing in silence. Just the way Soane would have wanted it." 2015: Dash Marshall LLC (architects/designers), New York City, cofounder and partner.
Carolyn Y. Yerkes (2008, Columbia University, architectural history)
"One of my favorite memories of the Soane was the day that I discovered the secret stash of American outlet adapters that previous Fellows had left for future Fellows to use. Many of the adapters were signed by researchers that I am 2015 happy to count among my colleagues and friends." 2015: Princeton, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Archaeology.
Jennifer S. Bevan (2012, University of Notre Dame, architecture)
"In studying Soane's collection of travel drawings—his own, George Dance the Younger's and the Adam brothers'—I recognized what have come to be known as Soane's innovative formal arrangements already at use in the buildings of antiquity. I went from looking to Soane for lessons in the sustainable management of light and ventilation to looking with Soane at the works of antiquity for those same lessons." 2015: Bevan & Liberatos Architects, Charleston, S.C., cofounder and partner.
Danielle Shea Willkens (2007, University of Virginia, architecture)
"I was able to spend some time in the museum alone prior to one of the candlelit evenings. The museum was quiet, the candles were lit, and a rare thunderstorm had descended on London that July evening, so the sky was dark and moody. Walking through the crypt and beneath the museum dome, it felt like I stepped back in time." 2015: Auburn University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture; completing PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
Laurel Peterson (2014, Yale University, art history)
"One morning, eager to study Sir James Thornhill's painted sketch for a ceiling at Hampton Court Palace, I arrived just before the doors opened to the public and quickly made my way to the Picture Room. Alone in my favorite room, I had ample time to gaze at the Thornhill—revealed by an open, densely hung screen—and was only slightly, but happily, distracted by the nearby Hogarth and Canaletto paintings." 2015: Yale, doctoral candidate in the history of art.
David Pullins (2011, Harvard University, history of art and architecture)
"The Soane's collections so are so rich and the knowledge of the curators so deep that they cannot help but ground your research in all its historical complexity. The fellowship allowed me to keep alive an important part of my research that did not find its way into my PhD, namely classical decoration in England and its intersection with an older tradition of rococo ornament and exoticism." 2015: National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA).
Brigid von Preussen (2013, Columbia University, art history)
"My time at the Soane gave me an enduring respect for the physical reality of any archive, which can so often be obscured or forgotten when material is brought up from hidden stacks, or when it is digitized and accessible at a click." 2015: Courtauld Institute of Art, Samuel H. Kress pre-doctoral Institutional Fellowship.
Sam Roche (2006, Yale University, architecture)
"Much of what I read about John Soane before studying his architecture closely positioned him as a revolutionary architect who through layering, subdivision, and hidden light sources created endlessly varied spatial sequences, mostly for interiors. I began to understand their links with the past, and these 2015 seem more important than the ways he broke with it." 2015: architect, New York City.
James E. Lenahan (2015, University of Notre Dame, architecture)
Check out his blog posting.
More remembrances to come…
The 20th ANNIVERSARY of the Traveling Fellowship program was marked in 2015 with the first ever a gathering of Fellows at the Visionaries Gala dinner held at New York's Rainbow Room on September 30th that year. Left to right: Danielle Shea Willkens '07, Seth Baum '13, Jennifer S. Bevan '12, Acting Soane Museum Director Helen Dorey, Soane Foundation Director Richard H. Driehaus, Soane Fellowship Committee Chair Peter Pennoyer, Nicholas Andrew Herman '10, Bryan Boyer '05, Christopher Drew Armstrong '00, Sean E. Sawyer '95 (the first Fellow and now member of the Fellowship Committee), Soane Foundation President Thomas A. Kligerman, R. Samuel Roche '06. Photo: Matt Gillis