GOETHE, BONTHEX AND SOANE
Already amongst his earlier designs there is an amazingly personal
blend of Baroque grandeur of composition with Grecian severity
of detail. Soane was the first (except for Piranesi, the engraver) to
understand the terr&ilitb of the Greek Doric order. Then during the
nineties Soane discovered that the severity which was his aim could
be achieved by sheer unadorned surface—a discovery which makes
his work appear so topical to-day. He had been appointed architect
to the Bank of England in 1788.
The exterior, before it was converted by recent governors and
directors into a podium for a piece of 20th-century commercial
showiness, indicates this new and to the majority shocking austerity.
The interiors, preserved though atrociously ill-treated, give an even
clearer idea of his sense of surface integrity. Walls flow smoothly
into vaults. Mouldings are reduced to a minimum. Arches sit on
piers which they seem to touch only in points. No precedent is
allowed to cramp the master's style. The Dulwich Gallery of 1811-
14 (damaged by bombs but not irreparably) and Soane's own
house in Lincoln's Inn Fields (pi. xcvm), built in 1812-13 and intended
to be carried on to more than double its width, are his most inde-
pendent designs. The ground floor of the house has severely plain
arcading in front of the actual wall; the first floor repeats this un-
usual motif with the variation of a centre with Ionic columns sup-
porting the thinnest of architraves, and wings where the weight
of the piers is lightened by typically Soanian incised ornament. The
top pavilions on die left and the right are equally original. Except
for die Ionic columns there is not one motif in the whole facade that
has a Greek or Roman ancestry. Here more than anywhere in archi-
tecture England approached a new style unhampered by the past,
and a style moreover that possesses the crispness and precision of the
dawning machine age. Soane for all we know was not in special
sympathy with that age, which in most of its social and visual
aspects was still sordid enough. Soane was a wilful, obstinate and
irritable character, and wilful is his almost Art Nouveau looking
ornament. But its mining is clear. These delicate lines emphasise
the planes into which they are cut, just as the lack of pediments on
die flat roofs emphasise the cubic relations of such planes. From the
beginning of his career Soane had been fascinated by this problem
of cubic relations. He first expressed it with massive Doric columns
and rustication, but later with flat surfaces of seeming skin or film
or slab thinness.
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