John Soane, one of Britain's greatest architects, left Britain his visual imagination not just in his buildings but in his will. When he died in 1837, a saddened man, he gave his remarkable museum home to the nation on the condition that it was kept as he left it. Sir John Soane's Museum in central London is a true wonder, a cabinet of architectural curiosities and, I like to think, the mind of Soane pickled for posterity. No, it doesn't feature this bricklayer-turned-Royal Academician's actual brain in some mahogany and brass case filled with formaldehyde; it's far more subtle than that. As you step into 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, you know you are seeing the world through the eyes and labyrinthine mind of a very remarkable man. The house itself is a labyrinth and is as far from the classical ideal as it was possible to be when Soane began transforming it into a museum of his own making and image after the death of his wife in 1815. Soane designed many important buildings, not least the magnificent Regency-era Bank of England, but as this was destroyed along with much of the architect's major work, his London home remains his enduring monument.
A friend of Turner, with whom he went fishing, Soane, like his artist chum, was a creature in his own chosen field as rare as a coelacanth: an English architect who rose to the top from the humblest beginnings. Born the son of a bricklayer in Berkshire, at 15 the scantily educated Soane was a hod-carrier.
Through fortunate circumstances, he was introduced by James Peacock, a surveyor, to the inventive young London architect George Dance the Younger in 1768. Three years later, he was one of the first architectural pupils at the Royal Academy of Arts. He won the RA's Gold Medal for the design of a Triumphal Bridge (unbuilt) in 1776 and was soon off on the Grand Tour (de rigueur for aspiring architects of his generation). He met Piranesi, whose etchings, particularly the grim Carceri (prisons) series shaped the haunted spirit of his manic-depressive imagination for the rest of his life, and four future wealthy clients. He became, despite his well-recorded self doubts, hugely successful.
Now, more than 150 years on from his death, the RA has mounted an impressive exhibition, designed by Piers Gough, of the life and work of one of its most famous sons. In fact, this is the first major show of Soane's work and we ought to wonder why. Not just because the British have been famously slow to recognise and celebrate architectural talent, but because Soane's idiosyncratic style - a maverick classicism very much of his own - went out of fashion pretty much as soon as he died. His star was not to ascend again until the 1920s (championed, at first, by the artist and critic Roger Fry). It reached its new zenith in the mid-1980s and has shined brightly in the architectural firmament ever since. But why bother with a major exhibition of Soane when we have Sir John's own museum?
Whatever, it's great to see Soane being championed by the RA and taken out to a wider audience than previously. And the catalogue for the show is quite superb. As for Soane, he would have expected no less; he was quite aware that his was a considerable talent and yet he spent much of his adult life a melancholy and even bitter man. Part of the reason for this is that he was understandably ambitious and expected as much of himself as he did of his sons who proved to be, so he thought, wastrels. In 1812, faced with legal action because of his redesign of the front of 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, a near estrangement from his wife Eliza (the daughter, by the way, of a rich builder) and what he saw as the undermining behaviour of his sons George and John, Soane wrote his "Crude Hints towards a history of my house in L I Fields".
This is the record of a depressive, a man who had come from next to nothing, who couldn't understand why life should be less perfect than art. His troubles were not relieved by the premature deaths of Eliza in 1815 and John junior in 1823; and certainly not by attacks on his reputation. He blamed Eliza's sudden death on the vicious criticism of his work that appeared in The Champion; it was written by his son George.
PERHAPS his one truly happy relationship was with Fanny. No, not a diaphanous Regency mistress but his dog, a cockney mongrel. Dogs never lie about love and Soane built Fanny a handsome memorial stone ("Alas, Poor Fanny" its legend reads) that can be seen in the area through the windows of his home's "Monk's Parlour".
Soane's sadness, his essential darkness of character, is key to understanding not just his personality, but his architecture. He was, as historians tend to agree, a master of interior space rather than grand architectural statements. Even his finest work, the Bank of England (interiors wickedly demolished, 1925-6) was set behind high walls that made the heart of the bank all but invisible. The best of his surviving designs - his museum and the Picture Gallery at Dulwich in south London - are modest on the outside but as rich as Croesus inside.
These are gloriously refined, deeply imaginative labyrinths, where the established rules of classicism are broken (George Dance the Younger first taught him how to do this) and spaces - sometimes these are more like landscapes than rooms - flow or insinuate themselves one into the other. This is something the masters of the Modern Movement learnt, but Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe took their cue from the Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was born 30 years after Soane's death and there is nothing to tell us whether or not he knew the plans of the Bank of England or 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields. But, where Wright, Mies and Le Corbusier flooded their free-flowing interiors with daylight, Soane controlled the light that filtered down into his from shallow domes, from lunettes and secret skylights with much the same mastery as his friend Turner did with oils. Soane sought what he called poetic effect in his architecture; in other words, his interiors were representations of sensations; his buildings are dreams for living in, not machines. And, like dreams, most have gone.
One of Soane's closest collaborators was Joseph Michael Gandy, an architect based in Liverpool, who painted dreamy canvases depicting Soane's designs both built and unbuilt. Most of all, he showed Soane's greatest works, including the Bank of England, as the ruins they might be in 1,500 years' time. Most were wrecked long before that. Why did Soane want Gandy to immortalise his greatest designs in the guise of tragic ruins? Partly, perhaps, as a homage to Piranesi whose Carceri etchings meant so much to him, and partly because of the Gothic darkness that had long invaded his soul.
Successful, Soane did not die a happy death. His influence, however, has slowly, slowly seeped into the modern architectural consciousness. The RA exhibition catalogue shows recent buildings as diverse as Richard MacCormac's extension to St John's College, Oxford and Juan Navarro's Congress Hall in Salamanca that owe a heavy debt to Soane. "Soane's ability," says Margaret Richardson, curator of Sir John Soane's Museum, "to continue to engage the attention of architects working at the end of the 20th century, without inhibiting their powers of invention, is possibly his greatest legacy." Maybe. Or perhaps it's the fact - as far as this is a fact - that Soane showed us how an architect's mind can express itself freely through a chosen canon of architecture; that emotions, deep, dark and even depressive, can be represented in bricks, mortar and, in his case, mirrors, pendentive domes and incised plaster. And make us glad that he existed even though he wasn't so very sure sometimes himself.
John Soane: Architect, Master of Space and Light is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (0044 171-300 8000) till December 3rd. Sir John Soane's Museum is at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2. Details: 0044 171-405 2107.
