Architecture is a coy mistress, only to be won

by unwearied assiduities and constant

attention; but when the mind is wedded to her,
the imagination is filled with wonder and delight,
and the possessor feels himsejf well rewarded
for the trouble.
Sir John Soane, Memoirs of the Professional
Life of an Architect (1835)
"His saltern accumulem donis et fungar inani
munere (Let me, at all events, pile up these
funeral rites and perform vain offices)
Virgil, Aeneid
It is through a theatre of spectacle that Soane was most able
to animate the aesthetic theories that interested him, setting the picturesque,
the sublime
and
lumiere mysterieuse
to create effects that were not only highly romantic but that
challenged the visitors readings of spatiality and materiality, and the very
Classical
tradition of architecture that he had been trained in and generally utilized.

Soane is a master of effects, taking a range of effects from nonarchitectural

media and setting them into operation within architecture

It would be good to dynamize thinking, to think of a text,

whether book, paper, film, painting, or building, as a thief in
the night. Furtive, clandestine, and always complex, it
steals ideas from all around, from its own milieu and
history, and, better still, from its outside, and disseminates
them elsewhere... Like concepts, texts are complex
products, effects of history, the intermingling of old and
new, a complex of internal coherences and consistencies
and external referents, of intension and extension, of
thresholds and becomings... They are eventssituated in
social, institutional, and conceptual space."
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, Space,
Time and Perversion (1995)

it examines the ways in which the house-museum manifests a

concern with self-representation, legacy, taste and spectacular display

presents a series of spectacular aesthetic effects that are wonders,

pure image

these scenes are in

effect also signs, coded with references, quotations, and expositions of aesthetic
theory

is thus to be understood as textual in the manner outlined by Elizabeth

Grosz above. As a textual production, it is coded, inscribed and interiorized, and
a space
which generates (exterior) effects.
For Grosz, such textual productions are at their most
interesting when they operate as modes of effectivity and action that, at their
best,
scatter thoughts and images into different linkages or new alignments without
necessarily destroying their materiality. Ideally, they produce unexpected
intensities,
peculiar sites of indifference, new connections with other objects, and thus
generate
affective and conceptual transformations.2

influences, references, connections, extensions, and productions

Soanes interest and success lies in his unique handling of

interior space

It is evident that the whole ground floor,

and the basement story, of Mr. Soanes
house, are fully replenished with works of
art and virtu. It is indeed a richly stored
museum; and although apparently adapted
merely for spectacle and display, the house
contains every domestic accommodation
and comfort for a small family.
John Britton, The Union of Architecture,
Sculpture and Painting (1827)

it operated in many different

ways: it was a model town house, demonstrating a proper gentlemanly abode
and a
diversity of architectural invention within a restricted space; it was a
connoisseurial
collection demonstrating Soanes taste and discernment; it was a didactic
collection, in
which the house itself provided as much instruction as the objects it contained;
and it
was a catalogue of architectural detail and form