Volume 30, Number 21 & 22 · January 19, 1984
Space Explorer
By Mark Girouard
Architectural Monographs: John Soane
with contributions by Sir John Summerson, by David Watkin, by G.-Tilman Mellinghoff
Academy Editions/St. Martin's Press, 123 pp., $19.95 (paper)
John Soane: The Making of an Architect
by Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey
University of Chicago Press, 408 pp., $37.50
Is it coincidence that the two strangest and most original English architects had working-class, or at best lower-middleclass, origins? Nicholas Hawksmoor—Wren's clerk, Vanbrugh's shadow and mentor, but in the opinion of some a greater architect than either of them—was the son of a Nottinghamshire small-holder. John Soan was the son of a bricklayer, and may have worked as a bricklayer's assistant in his boyhood. Pierre du Prey, in the book under review, describes his slow and painful metamorphosis into Sir John Soane, architect to the Bank of England and the doyen of his profession.
Review, 2539 words
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