Monday, January 18, 2010

London: Sir John Soane's Museum



















While doing my ICOMOS library internship in London in the early 1990s, I stayed part of the time with architects John Adams and Marina Dunbar Adams in Clapham. They were always giving good advice about places to check out; one of them was Sir John Soane's Museum at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Primarily an architect, Soane (1753-1837), like Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), loved to tinker endlessly.  The museum shows this. Walk around and see his crazy love of Neo-Classical designs and artifacts. (Neo-Classical?  Inspired by ancient Greek and "finer" Roman architecture, and by Renaissance Italy).  In more than one way, it's a trip. 

http://www.britishtours.com/360/soane-museum.html


Soane's whole place is filled with nutty treasures, but even people like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung populated their offices with all sorts of totems and artifacts from other times and other places.  More on them at some point, I suspect.  How about you?  Do you have favorite things around you while in repose?

Here's to a more civil society as strived for by MLK and his spiritual cousins . . . 

Today's Rune: Journey.

5 comments:

the walking man said...

I love having dreamless sleep around me while in repose, and the quirks of this world around me when I am not resting.

Charles Gramlich said...

I would love to have seen Freud and Jung's offices. And Darwins.

Lana Gramlich said...

Oh yes, don't we all have our own little totems & trinkets? Memories in matter. Among mine are a small, copper statue of St. Francis of Assisi. I discovered it's magnetized one day, when I set a compass next to it. Nearby is my collection of feathers found in our yard, including blue jay, cardinal, crow, mourning dove & some kind of hawk.

Erik Donald France said...

Thanks all, for the comments! Charles, I'll have to look into Darwin's. The others are definitely interesting. Mark, indeed. And Lana, very cool. Very cool, indeed. NOt a bad idea to do a mini-roster of such things. Reminds me of a Rilke poem, I think.

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