‘Soane’s Lost Room’
Graphite on paper. 2020.
Triptych (42 x 29 cm each)
“Moving through the corridor leading to Hogarth’s Room, I stumbled upon a hallway which I had never seen before. Or perhaps it was always there, but I simply had yet to venture through it. After all, Soane’s labyrinth of a museum-home had an incredible ability to disorient me. As I moved through it, I noticed something very peculiar about the objects which adorned this particular space. They were not relics from the ancient past, but from a time which was much more contemporary to the drawings and sculptures which hung in the Picture Room. They were modernist.
Le Corbusier, Shin Takamatsu and Ugo Brunoni… Xenakis, Venturi and Saarinen, Locsin’s Tanghalang Pambansa and Bo Bardi’s MASP… Every surface of wall was covered by scaled models of notable buildings from across the world. Famed architectural heritages, lined up, stacked up upon one another with no particular way of classification.Ceilings seemed to stretch up to infinity, while corridors were pulled to an endless length. As I moved up the staircase and down the hall, I noticed small sculptures and maquettes of forms that I had only seen drawn on paper. Further ahead, a glimmer of light passing through a slightly opened door pulled me closer. I could only hear my own footsteps, but I could feel that I was not alone. Slowly nudging the door with my finger, I peered into this small room… a treasure trove of architectural cultural icons. On the desk at the end of the room, a small ledger was opened…the ink had yet to dry.”
Inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, namely, Funes the Memorius and The Library of Babel, the drawings begin to question the notions of (architectural) memory and that of safeguarding the (architectural) heritage of our recent past. The Sir John Soane Museum merges the architectural typologies of the curated museum with that of the home, creating a labyrinth of spaces which hold artefacts of our architectural past. It posits an intriguing notion today, when access to depositories (museums) become more restricted, with many opting for “virtual” tours from the comfort of one’s own home. So, the idea of a continuous act of recording and curating the architectural heritage of the world becomes the underpinning question of this set of drawings, imagining the dwelling as a space of collecting and curating a more recent architectural heritage.
The triptych was inspired out of the lockdown, and somewhat evolved from the Apartment #5 drawings. The drawings imagine what Soane’s collection would have looked like, if he were to collect fragments of our more recent architectural past. However, the spaces are actually the corridors, staircase and room in my home. I imagined it as Soane would have imagined his own dwelling: a labyrinth of spaces, where maquettes of famed modernist works, both built and unbuilt, line the walls.