WALKING IN HOUSES

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has the fantasy that some time after I’m dead my home 

will be turned into a small private museum.  Visitors will come from all over the world to see 

how the great man lived, and to walk from room to room looking at my cool stuff, 

preserved and displayed in cabinets and vitrines. This goes along with the notion that in the 

end everybody’s home becomes a kind of museum of the self.

 

         This has been on my mind because I’ve recently walked in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House in Lansdowne Walk, Holland Park.  These, you’d have to say, were severely constrained walks, like walking in an art gallery but more so.  

         Soane (1753-1837) was a ‘proper’ architect who designed the Bank of England, the Royal Chelsea Hospital and much more besides.  His museum consists of three houses that he bought, demolished and rebuilt.

I think you could say Jencks (1939-2019) was more of an architectural theorist that an architect, and a post-modeernist at that.  He designed the Cosmic House in collaboration with Terry Farrell, modifying a house built in the 1840s - John Soane’s era more or less.

 

         Both houses are fantastic in several senses, and (it may surprise you) both Soane and Jencks had a great deal more cool stuff than I do. Soane’s is full of antiquities, including a sarcophagus.  

 

Jencks’ is full of cosmic symbols and symbolism including an Eduardo Paolozzi mosaic of a black hole.

 

Both seem to have had a taste for obelisks.

 

In both houses as I walked around I lived in fear that I might turn suddenly and accidentally knock over some prize artifact.  I didn’t but I easily could have.

 

There are of course some houses where you can actually have a good walk inside. Hardwick Hall, for instance has a Long Gallery that’s 162 feet from end to end, but if you lived there I bet you’d spend a lot of time looking for your misplaced cellphone and wallet.