An excellent In Our Time episode on Sir John Soane brought me up short. Guests talked about Joseph Gandy, a talented draughtsman and artist who worked closely with Soane to turn Soane’s architectural drawings into realistic depictions. Gandy and Soane both had a taste for the aesthetics of ruins. One of Soane’s greatest commissions was for a new Bank of England. Gandy transformed the architectural drawings into realistic paintings, one of which showed the Bank as a ruin, a thousand years in the future.
Hang on a minute. About three weeks ago I listened to an episode of 99% Invisible that was all about Albert Speer — Hitler’s architect — and his plans to reconstruct Berlin as Germania, centre of the Nazi Empire. Hitler wanted Nazi architecture to mirror his ideology to the end of the world, and there was Speer with a drawing of his proposed Nazi Party Rally Grounds as an ivy-covered ruin. He got the commission.
Coincidences tend to send me down rabbit holes. So it was that I found out that Speer came up with the idea of Die Ruinenwerttheorie — The Theory of Ruin Value — while planning for the 1936 Olympic Games. Unaware, perhaps, of Soane, he claimed the idea as his own, but I was happy to see that Wikipedia notes that “he was not its original inventor”. Nor, indeed, was Soane.
A fascination with ruins had been brewing for some years, what with Pompeii and Herculaneum and the ruins of Rome. Soane had met Piranesi in Rome and was clearly influenced by his work. And gardens in England and Europe, as well as landscape paintings, were being adorned with tasteful new ruins for quite a while before Soane drew up his plans for the Bank.
As for Speer, in his memoir he wrote: “Ultimately, all that remained to remind men of great epochs of history was their monumental architecture.” Maybe. His only surviving buildings in Berlin contain public toilets, “so visitors can actually shit on Nazi architecture”.
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