Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation, in conjunction with Architectural Record Magazine, presents the 2008 Soane Seminars. Some of the most innovative architects practicing in the early 21st century will discuss their debt to the early 19th-century architecture of Sir John Soane. The investigation is particularly apropos owing to Soane’s well-known use of simple masses, clean lines and forms, and his dramatic manipulation of light and reflective surfaces. |
The architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, acclaimed for the American Folk Art Museum in New York (2001), will lead session one.
Their firm was recently selected to design the new museum for the incomparable Barnes Collection, to be built on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.
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Billie Tsien and Tod Williams
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(dates to be announced):
Another architect who will address Soane's influence is David Chipperfield, who is completing the restoration and renovation of the 19th-century Neues Museum in Berlin. |
David Chipperfield |
Daniel Libeskind |
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An exhibition of Chipperfield’s work will be on view at Sir John Soane Museum in London in 2008 (June to September - please see www.Soane.org for exact dates and details).
A third architect in the series is Daniel Libeskind, whose Denver Art Museum addition, completed in 2006, makes use of space and light within abstractly massive forms in ways that recall Soane's own earlier architectural contributions. In 2001, there was the exhibition at the Soane Museum entitled “Libeskind at the Soane: Drawing A New Architecture.” |
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PROFILE: TOD WILLIAMS BILLIE TSIEN ARCHITECTS
Billie Tsien was born in Ithaca, New York in 1949. She received undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from Yale in 1971 and her Masters in Architecture from UCLA in 1977.
Tod Williams was born in Detroit in 1943. He received both his Bachelors and Masters of Fine Arts and Architecture from Princeton University in 1965 and 1967 respectively
Tsien and Williams have worked together since 1977 and have been in partnership since 1986.
Their work includes the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California and American Folk Art Museum in New York City.
Advance RESERVATIONS are required, and are payable by check or credit card.
Patron Tickets at $80 per person, per session - includes a special private reception following the talk.
Regular Tickets at $30 per person, per session
 FULL PROGRAM INFORMATION, RESERVATION FORM, and SOANE SEMINAR BACKGROUND (4-pages)
Register with this form call Chas Miller at 212 223-2012 or email: chas@soanefoundation.com
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SEMINAR LIAISON:
Suzanne Stephens is a member of the Board of Directors of Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation. She teaches architectural criticism at Barnard College and is a deputy editor of Architectural Record magazine.
LOCATIONS OF SEMINARS:
Our first session will be held at the Union Club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Note: Business Attire Required
REGISTRATION:
Sessions - $30 per session, or Seminar Patron at $80 per session (includes a private reception following the talk). |
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Whilst Soane’s idiosyncratic and very personal style of architecture and design had its share of critics during his lifetime, his stripped down classicism found new admirers in the 20th century and continues to attract appreciation from new generations. Architects admire his handling of space and light and his buildings and ideas are regarded as stimulating and relevant to architectural and interior design ideas of the 21st century.
But it was not until the 1920s that Soane’s work found a persuasive champion in the unlikely figure of Roger Fry. As the organizer of two pioneering exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 Fry had brought the new French art from Manet to Picasso to a somewhat dull London art scene, and he had since become the English spokesman for Modernism. The controversial destruction of Soane’s masterpiece, The Bank of England, in 1925 ironically galvanized public attention on Soane’s work.
Others followed: Mario Praz, the Italian writer and connoisseur, and the architect and polemicist Professor Sir Albert Richardson were key figures in the first half of the twentieth century in promoting the Regency Revival, and Soane’s work and Museum in particular. English architects Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (the designer behind the famous K2 red telephone box) and Raymond Erith, owe much to Soane – whilst in the United States Robert Venturi’s ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’ (1966) looked for ambiguities and complexities in the architecture of the past that would reinforce a contemporary architecture of richness and meaning. Venturi drew attention to many of theses qualities in Soane’s work; the complex combinations of shapes in his ceilings, the partition of spaces in rooms in the form of suspended arches, the intricacies of planning and of spaces within spaces, and the layering of canopies and domes.
During the Postmodern era of the later 1970s and 1980s there have been many reflections of Soanean themes amongst a generation of architects and designers who find inspiration in Soane’s ideas. Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Rafael Moneo and Denise Scott Brown amongst many others have generously acknowledged their debt to Soane and have acknowledged how his Classicism manages to be both conventional and deviant. The fact that Soane’s ideas continue to engage the attention of modern architects and designers working in the early 21st century without inhibiting their own powers of invention, is probably his greatest legacy. And Sir John Soane’s Museum’s role as a place of inspiration for contemporary architects and designers from all over the world is perhaps more important today than ever before.
Click the above BOLDED NAMES and ITEMS to read their Wikipedia entries. |
Sir John Soane's Museum Foundation
1040 First Avenue, No. 311,
New York, NY 10022 USA
T . 212-223-2012 Info@SoaneFoundation.com |
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