 Today we're going to talk about John Sohn, and John Sohn is one of my favorite architects. He's one of the big heroes of this course. I don't know if I would put him right up there with Michelangelo as the star of this course, but he's pretty close. And I would say that of all the people we're looking at or that we've been looking at so far, he's the first one who has a really modern sensibility. When I say modern, it's going to seem odd because he's really working in this period of historical eclecticism where people are not so much trying to invent new forms as to develop strategies to find forms that will convey the meanings that they want to communicate. They want to communicate things they might think about associationism. What kind of associations are conjured up with what kind of building? Or they might think of things like character. Does the character of this temple communicate the values you want to have for your bank? My hunch is most bankers think that temple communicates the values for a bank just fine, which is why so many banks look like temples. Not so many gothic banks. Have you noticed that? You just wouldn't trust your money to a gothic bank because you think that supernatural things might happen to your money. If you put your money in a nice classical bank, your money will stay put and things will be fine. Earlier efforts at grappling with this historical conundrum that we looked at involved image making historical eclecticism. We saw Walpole's Strawberry Hill, an early example of gothic revival where he's really trying to get a kind of Disney-esque or let's say Epcot Center-esque look of the gothic. Lots of pointy towers, lots of crenellation, lots of irregular geometries, but it really is a kind of wallpaper thin look of the gothic where the actual architecture has to do with surfaces. If you looked at Walpole's Strawberry Hill and said, what's he contributing to the discourse of architecture? You know, how is he pushing the envelope of what architecture could do? I would say, well, maybe he's opening it up to more historical examples that can be folded in. Maybe he's finding a new way to make ornament or even make wallpaper, but he's not really making many explorations about what the building envelope can do or how it works spatially or what the organization of a plan might be. It certainly doesn't behave structurally in the way that real gothic behaves. Although I would say Fontale Abbey is a more ambitious scheme, this kind of big pile of a gothic revival project that we looked at from the end of the 18th century, it too is trying to deal with history in a way that relies on a historical repertoire of forms to be out there and that the task of the architect is to eclectically select pieces. Now in the case of Fontale Abbey, there's a wildly inventive way of reassembling these pieces. It's almost like a Cartesian shish kebab of X, Y, and Z axes skewering together fragments of a gothic architecture. Here we have chunk of castle, here we have chunk of apps, here we have chunk of nave, here we have chunk of monastery, and here we have chunk of tower. So you have lots of quotation going on, and I guess there's a wildly inventive syntax, but still I'm going to say it is historicist in that it relies on the articulation of the pieces, the form of the pieces, the nature of the pieces to be pulled from a history. That is crazy though, you got to love that. So when we get John Sohn, he's facing the same kinds of challenges. Sohn is facing the same conundrum, what to do with history. Sohn is really contemporary with Wyatt, born in 1753, died in 1837. He is working during this turn of the century, if turn of the century means 18th to 19th century. And that's an interesting and challenging time. This is one of those moments that Thomas Coon identifies as a moment for a paradigm shift. When culture shifts radically, one reason culture is shifting radically is the industrial revolution is beginning to take off. You begin to have higher influxes of people in the cities. From the point of view of architects, new materials are available, not widely available, not like they're available today, but you don't need to go out and get the iron smith to make a bracket for you out of metal. You can get cast metal things, glass is being industrially produced, and so different opportunities are available for the architects. Sohn has an interesting personal biography. Sohn was born the son of a bricklayer, but when he was 15 years old, he was so determined to be an architect that he had himself apprentice to the architect George Jans. Like many architects, he went on a grand tour, but that's not so surprising. While on his grand tour, he met all the rich people in England, because the only people who went on grand tours were artists, architects, and phenomenally rich people. That's enough to launch a career. If you go on that grand tour, you will get commissions from your friends for the rest of your life. And on this grand tour, Sohn began collecting. He began collecting plaster casts of statues, giant cork models of buildings, engravings by Piranesi, paintings by Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. But luckily, he met all those rich people on his first grand tour, and therefore eventually amassed quite a lot of personal wealth. His original idea was that he would establish a dynasty with his sons and that they would pick up after him and continue the practice. These souvenirs, these grand tour souvenirs, weren't just amusements. Like, oh, here is my beautiful cork model of the Colosseum. But rather, they were working tools that anytime you needed to re-engage the experience of seeing the Colosseum, you could look at your Piranesi print or your giant cork model or a plaster cast of one of the capitals. And these were the tools architects needed to advance. Just want to show you some of Sohn's student work, because I know as beginning students of architecture, it's sometimes hard to know what to do. Sohn had the project of dog house. And this is a good place for a dog, isn't it? There are like little dogs running around on the sculptural frieze here, and little dogs here drinking at the fountain. But beyond that, boy, it doesn't look like a dog house. But this is what academic architecture more or less was producing. There was an interest in symmetry. There was an interest in the application of the orders. There was an interest in solid, clear massing. And when I say academic architecture, by this I mean there was a proliferation of the teaching method of the French Academy. Many countries established teaching schools based on those premises, based on the premises of what we call the School of Fine Arts, the École des Beaux-Arts. This is an example of that. But to Sohn's credit, he's already here showing a taste for a kind of stripped-down classicism. He's not glopping it up to the degree that glop could be applied at the time. But rather, he's playing with simple geometries and the powerful play of light and shade. So he did a thesis project. It's going to be better than this. It's a bridge. I just love this stuff. It's a triumphal bridge. Why don't your projects look like this? People would probably shoot you if you tried to do this because Zeitgeist says no, no possibility. But there's a lot of energy in this project. If you did it in my studio, I would like it because of the seven-foot-long watercolor drawing that you did to go along with it. But look at what Sohn is beginning to suggest here. This is a really interesting attitude about historical eclecticism. And that is, like, let's have all of it. Let's just put it all together. Let's somehow make an architecture not out of trying to clarify and organize in a Beaux-Arts fashion. But let's try to make an architecture out of jamming as much of it in there as we possibly can. This project, I think, is particularly interesting in light of Sohn's subsequent work, which tends to take a strategy quite different from any strategy we've seen, except perhaps Piranesi's way of space planning in the campus marshes reconstructions. Here, Sohn takes a really clear perimeter, the outline of the bridge, and just jams it full of strongly figural pieces. The figural pieces don't get to organize space as ideal objects, but they negotiate and jockey for space in this tight field of pieces. The thing that holds them together is the clarity of their own form and the clarity of the perimeter envelope that they're situated in. When we look at Sohn's later projects, like Bank of England, which we'll see very soon, we'll see that this is exactly the same method that he operates on there. One of the things that makes Sohn such an interesting architect is that there is in his work a constant reference to classical architecture, but a complete willingness to transform it and to reimagine it, not simply based on a sense of the picturesque, but really on a new spatial sensibility. For example, he was very interested in the pendentive dome. We see an example of a pendentive dome here in Sohn's family monument. What it really is is a kind of floppy surface. It's a floppy surface that really streamlines the idea of architectural structure and strips away everything that's not completely essential. It is a method of having complete continuity between surface and support. Structure is used, but there's no literal use of the orders anywhere in Sohn's work. Another benefit of the pendentive dome is that it's possible to bring light in from above in several ways. Here we see an oculus, but we also have these lunettes or thermal window-shaped elements that further allow light to wash across surface, and I think one thing that really distinguishes Sohn's work is the idea of light and how light becomes a constituent factor in shaping architectural space. In Sohn's library, which grew to be quite extensive by the time of his death, he had over 11 copies of Loge's essay on architecture. We all know the primitive hot. Part of his debt to Loge expresses itself in this primitivist sensibility, a kind of stripped-down classicism where everything that is extraneous is removed, and instead you have these very simple surfaces and volumes. Sohn did a project for a church in London, and I think this drawing is really spectacular. This is no longer student work, but it's a spectacular drawing, and I think what's so nice about it is this is the plan depicted here as a ruin, and these are possibilities for what you could stick over that plan. There's a collected freedom here, really, that given the desire to have a longitudinal plan of more or less this size, you can get quite a lot of variation. This is a good way to sell a project to a client, right? Giant seven-foot-long watercolor with eight different church plans that go over your basic floor plan. You can clearly see by the kinds of drawings that Sohn is doing that he's closely associated with this idea of the sublime and romanticism. Sohn believes that the best architecture can be identified by the fact that it makes a beautiful ruin. Frequently he will draw his buildings as ruins, and you can understand how he would get that idea because he spent over two years on the Grand Tour, and what you do when you're on the Grand Tour is you walk around the forum, you sketch stuff, you get ideas, you put them on paper, and a beautiful ruin is what you want, and a beautiful ruin is what you have. Additionally, connected to the sublime are ideas of this jagged landscape with these ruined churches scattered about it, and a tumultuous sky, a sky in the state of storm. So nature and architecture are at loggerheads here. It's not unconnected to this drawing that we looked at very briefly before by Humphrey Repton, where he's studying the character of houses. Based on what you're after, you can more or less have the same house adorned in these different fashions. So Sohn is a wild man, and one thing that makes Sohn so fun to look at from this historical vantage point is that he employed an amazing artist on his staff to record things, and some of the things he recorded are things like this, the collection of all Sohn's projects shown in this spectacular manner, or if you don't like them hunkering down inside of a room, all of Sohn's projects, imaginary and constructed, spread out over a Tuscan landscape worthy of Claude Lorraine. This guy, Gandhi, would record activities that go on in Sohn's office, and some of some of the things that Gandhi drew were actually people building the buildings, always sublime, always strong light, always fabulous. You know, on first glance it seems as though there's a strong kinship between Sohn and somebody like John Nash. Both of them seem to be terribly interested in the picturesque. Both of them seem to be happy to move between different styles, but there's a strong, strong difference in so far as much of what Nash does has to do with the exterior image of the thing, and much of what Sohn does has to do with qualities of space that are purely interior. Sohn refers to history, but he is unconstrained by classical loyalties and adventurous in his use of structure and adventurous in his use of how space can be defined. I mentioned before that a good way to launch a practice is to go on a grand tour, and Sohn did that. He was having a hard time getting a career going, really. You know, trying to get a house built for someone, the husband and wife squabble, the house doesn't get built, trying to build an office, nobody wants it. But finally he gets a commission, and it has to do with these connections that he made on his grand tour. The prime minister, helpful, and the brother of the director of the Bank of England. Sohn, when he was still in his early 30s, was given this commission to be the architect for the Bank of England. It's not so clear that the scope of that job was clearly delineated at the time. Sohn's salary, I think, is fairly spectacular, five percent of the cost of any building works. The Bank of England is giant. The Bank of England is a city block, and Sohn worked on this for 45 years, and during the course of that time he pretty much rebuilt every brick in the Bank of England. That's a good way to amass a fortune and begin to amplify your collection of Piranesi prints and Nicholas Poussin paintings. Sohn's project for the Bank of England, I think, is the best test of this making of interior space, in part because the program was rather challenging, and in part because the program constantly changed. This is a fabulous drawing by Joseph Gandy, a draftsman in Sohn's office, that shows you the final stage of the Bank of London as a ruin. And of course, why wouldn't you represent it as a ruin? That's the true test of architecture. But this project kept growing. Sohn would do a part of it, they would acquire more land, he would do a part of it, they would acquire more land. So the final plan really becomes a kind of pastiche or jigsaw puzzle of strongly figural pieces knitting together. The whole task was further complicated by security measures for the Bank of England that said no exterior windows would be permitted. It's completely lit by interior courtyards, and we have quite a lot of these interior courtyards, and skylights, and thermal windows, and other ways of bringing light in from above rather than from the perimeter. It's also fabulous just if you look at the plan. This plan kind of reminds me of those paintings by Gandy, the guy in Sohn's office who did all the watercolors, where you just jam stuff together. Or it kind of reminds me of that bridge project that he did as a student, where you take these really strong figural pieces, a circle, a circle, a circle, and you pack them in as organizing devices in a very densely, densely packed out perimeter. That's going on here too. He's got a number of courtyards, and he's got a number of these circular pantheonic or rotunda-like spaces, and the whole project begins to hinge and readjust and realign based on these kinds of things. It's a really interesting building, and only occasionally does the figureality of the interior architecture poke out. One moment is over here, where you get this little rounded corner, and that's called the Tivoli Corner. The Tivoli Corner in honor of the Temple of the Vestal Virgins in Tivoli that landscape painters were so happy to paint, and that stowerhead imitated in their Temple to Apollo. The facade is really, really strange, and I would say modern in the same way that art deco buildings look modern, with this tautly stretched membrane occasionally coagulating into something figural, like this corner here, but for the most part it's just this like stretched rubber band wrapping around the building giving you almost no information, and then some. And here's the Tivoli Corner again. The plan of the Bank of England reminds me of the plan-making strategies used by Piranesi in his Campus Martius project. This is the imaginary reconstruction by Piranesi of the center of Rome, where he's taking things, some of which are strongly figural, like a circus or an arena, and jamming them together. Here's a detail of the plan-making strategies that Piranesi is using in Campus Martius, where the thickness of a wall or pochet or various circular spaces become almost like hinges to allow one chunk of program to realign and to disengage from another chunk of program. Look at Campus Martius and look at Bank of London. They're incredibly similar. They're also similar in having the same kind of emotive value. It says though, Sohn plays with the bizarre distortions of old themes in part to solve problems, technical problems, packing problems, but also to really ramp up the emotional value of the architecture as shown in this drawing of the bank as a ruin. He's interested in the sublime, he's interested in the picturesque, and he's particularly interested in the picturesque in a way intended by another one of these turn of the century, turn of the 19th century architectural critics, Utevel Price. Price suggests there's a middle term between the sublime and the beautiful, and in fact that middle term is picturesque. If the beautiful has to do with a manageable scale keyed into the proportions of the human body and the sublime has to do with an unmanageable scale overwhelmingly vast, then the picturesque is this mediating condition which has to do with variety and intricacy. And you see that in Sohn, you see the variety and the intricacy and how the small and the big knit together. You see it in the bank of London and you really see it in Sohn's house. Other aspects of the picturesque, according to Utevel Price, would be a preference for asymmetry, the contrast of scales, the contrast of textures, and the possibility of not simply one viewpoint through the space, but multiple viewpoints, multiple views vying for dominance. And again, you see that here again and again. You come into a space that seems to be singular in its clarity as courtyard, but it gives way to different local symmetries, different figures. In addition to having this crazy man plan-making strategy, there's also an idea about structure that Sohn is using that is not something we've seen before, or maybe we've seen it, but we've seen it in a slightly different version. Sohn has his own idea about a dome. He's interested in the pendentive, so he makes pendentive domes, but he floats pendentive domes in space. He doesn't necessarily fill in the walls, but there will be, when you see figures like this, often there's a folded rectilinear plate hovering above it. This is a favorite device of Sohn's, so much so that when he built the family tomb over here, you can see a really clear example of one of these pendentive domes, where this floppy square thing sits on four piers and becomes otherwise open to the elements. So here in the Bank of England, we see the same device being used, this amazing pendentive dome over the banking hall, and then a great lantern cutting upward, filled with stuff. There's like a carrioted course up here. There's an expansion of space upward. What Sohn I think is doing, and he's doing it in the Bank of England, but he really takes off in later projects, is that he's reinventing pochet, and pochet, remember, is this solid stuff, this blackened stuff that represents where the wall is, but he's reinventing it as a void. Instead of having solid thick wall in this channel of space, he has a sectional event of space popping up, bringing light in, so it's a kind of evacuated pochet, a voided pochet. He's doing things in purely spatial terms that other architects would have done using material. These are a few of Gandhi's drawings from the Bank of England, which I think are pretty great. We have the construction of the vaults. So we have brick work being constructed over timber form work. And this is a picture of Sohn in the Bank sketching. There's a ladder and the table has been crafted out of the ladder, and he's just making adjustments to the drawings on the site. This is another image, and this one is more contrived. It's not so much of a real sketch in the field of Sohn working, but these are all the drawings scattered out here. And here's tiny little Mr. Sohn working on these projects. You look at this and you see lots and lots of classical pieces, but I think probably the most radical thing about this building is the fact that it's crypto-classicism. And by crypto-classicism, I mean it's contained within a wrapper. It says, though you had a ziploc bag full of classical pieces that negotiate for primacy within the space, it is a wrapper that is mute about the figureality of the pieces it contains. And we see that here at a giant scale at the Bank of England and at a smaller scale in Sohn's house. The next project I'm going to show you is really kind of a minor project. It's not such an interesting one. What's interesting about it, I think, is the program as opposed to the actual spatial configuration. It's a gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, but the program of this gallery, I think, is as schizophrenically complex and multiple as the spatial ideas going in some of Sohn's projects and drawings like the Bank of England or those watercolors. The program is Picture Gallery, so far so good. Mausoleum, hmm, well that's an odd fit. Alm's houses. Alm's houses are housing for the poor. That's what you get here. You get a picture gallery, you get housing for the poor, and you get a tomb. That's quite a program. And probably the idea is that these people, because it's frequently this way, there's this neighborhood in Augsburg called the Fugerei that was built by the Fugers, who were great bankers, and they built this entire housing estate and people could live there almost for free, but they had to pray for Mr. Fugers' soul three times a day. That was part of the rent, because Fugere, in order to amass his incredible banking fortune, was a scoundrel, and the only way he could possibly get to heaven was to have an entire neighborhood full of people praying for him. And this might have been a similar situation, that the people living in the Alm's house would have to pray for the soul of the person rich enough to amass this nice collection of paintings. There are a few things going on here that kind of stripped down classical language that we've admired before, but it's not that interesting as a building. What is interesting as a building is the house museum that Sohn built for himself. As I said, he became a great collector of knickknacks, and he had hopes that his sons would pick up the practice, but at a certain point it became clear that his sons were gamblers, drunks, womanizers, goof-offs, all the things you hope your children will not be. So at that point, instead of disbanding this interest in collecting, Sohn began to collect with even more intensity, because what Sohn decided he would do is make a museum. If his original ambition was to raise the level of his family practice, his new ambition became to raise the level of culture in England, to raise the level of national taste by providing a place where people could come and see these examples of excellence. So where are you going to do something like that? And one answer is London, but the surprising piece of that whole answer is not a special building, not a freestanding building like the Dullwich Gallery, or even new construction, but a rehab. Sohn's house expanded into three houses, but their ordinary row houses on an ordinary square, Lincoln Inn's field in London. Even in terms of making the facade, there's a kind of conundrum. What do you do? How do you make a facade? How can you take a row house and somehow distinguish it as something other than ordinary row house, but also not disrupt the clarity of the urban edge that's so important in defining the square? And Sohn does that. He has all three of these houses. He takes the central one and clads it in stone and begins to make it become a little bit of a pavilion, a little bit of a monument, pulled ever so slightly out in front of the other ones. The facade is a good example of this tendency towards stripped-down classicism or a severe primitivism in Sohn's engagement with a classical language. We see just enough of a clue of what the language is, of what the orders are, of what the cadence of articulation is, to understand this as belonging to a tradition, but Sohn is more giving us a map of absence rather than an expression of presence. The actual language he uses to articulate this I think is indicative of Sohn's amazing spatial sensibility. You would expect columns, maybe. Why not? A little portico, some columns. Here's what Sohn gives you. This is the portico. Where are the columns? We have column capitals and we have absence of column. It's almost like voiding the pocher, but in this case giving you absence of column to articulate the wall rather than presence of column. You understand where the column should be by the brackets placed on either side and then you don't have it. There's a transformation on this idea of absence of column. As you move up, you get niches surrounded by these infolded theander patterns that almost look like crudely drawn, let's say, ionic columns. This device where they're folding in on themselves. So it's classical but also really kind of odd. And this is a Palladian device also, right, where you terminate the order with a statue on top of it. But one thing Sohn is doing here is he's taking stuff that he collected. Like he collects these examples of really great column capitals, sticks them on the wall. He collects sculptures, sticks them on the wall. He's got so much stuff that he's just sticking it on the wall. But there's a real severity to this language. I mean, think about the restraint with which Sohn is operating and making this facade compared to other architects that we've seen who seem to think that the core values in architecture reside in ornament rather than space or geometry or massing or light. Just as a point of comparison, I want to show you this is what Sohn's house looks like now and this is what Sohn's house looked like in the 1970s. So they're cleaning things and it's good that they're cleaning things, but it's also bad that they're cleaning things because a lot of these old buildings are limestone, which is a fairly soft stone. And centuries of grime actually form a little crust on the stone and protect it. And when you peel the grime away, sometimes they decay much, much faster. Let's look for a moment on the roof of Sohn's house museum. And this will give you a tip that, oh, even on the roof, he's got plenty of room for plaster casts of Greek gods, but he has something else on this roof also. And what he has are skylights. He's taking advantage of some of these new industrially produced materials like iron and glass and he's using them to reconceive how light comes into the building. Before I talk about the plan, I just want to show you this drawing by Gandhi. I have no idea why he did this. Maybe promoting the idea of this new museum. This institution of museum was quite, quite new. In fact, brand new, let me say that. Certain palaces like the Louvre or the Ophiti had collections of pictures. There were days when people could come and see them. Artists could make appointments to come and see them. But the idea of a publicly open museum is brand new. And this is one of the first ones. Because it's this kind of hybrid house museum. It doesn't get credit for being the first museum. Those honors go to buildings in Germany, but darn close. So here's the plan. Great looking plan. These are the three houses, 12, 13 and 14 that have been put together and immediately sewn as destabilizing the dominant axis through the house by a series of pieces that act as hinges to reorganize you, to re-center you, to relocate you in the space. We already have this where he cants the wall of number 13 inward to enforce a progression toward the breakfast nook over here. This is a good strategy because it's allowing entry into the museum bar to become more dramatic. And it's also creating this fake perspective cone to make your vision through this introductory slot of space more dramatic in general. And the breakfast nook, again a centralized space, acts as a hinge between the organization perpendicular to the street and the organization of the museum bar parallel to the street. Each of these blue spaces, by the way, is a courtyard bringing light in from above. Strategy he applied at the Bank of England and a strategy that he applies here at his own house. What is this? And the answer is the place where you would have had backyards in all the other row houses in this house becomes filled with a museum. And the museum is last roofed for the most part because he's packed out the entire lot with building. So you can't even get windows through the walls or you can't get windows in the walls because he's got too much stuff to hang on the walls. He really wants to have that stuff hanging on the walls. So sometimes you get light coming in from these internal courtyards. Sometimes you get light coming in from the skylights. But in the front, the building still behaves in a fairly conventional way with these little punch windows on the brick or masonry surfaces. One game that Sohn is playing here is the game of re-centering. You think you know where you are and you get pulled off center. You have a center for the little stone house here. The door is off center. You come in here and you get cranked off center if you walk up the stair. And if you come further in this direction, you find you are in this slot of space. Some of this voided sewn pochette that lines you up on the center of this very, very tall tower of space but at the perimeter of the breakfast room. When you get into the breakfast room, you suddenly find that you're on another important axis cutting through a number of courtyards. So one thing you get in this sewn house are these long views of framed space, framing space, framing space, framing space and constantly shifting your position in the space ever so slightly. Sohn is living in the front rooms. He's living over here. He's living over here. His offices for the most part are over here. The rooms are somewhat conventional and then you get this kind of triple height space worth of museum coming in up above. So let's look at these conventional rooms because even the conventional rooms are not all that conventional. Sohn is playing with a pochette in a really interesting way. If you look at this wall here, you see a surface and you see a surface and this wall is the wall right over here dividing the dining room from the front parlor. So he's deliberately made this wall as two surfaces. It's the idea that pochette is a pocket and what goes on inside of Sohn's pocket. Inside of Sohn's pocket, he fills it full of little knickknacks. He's got all these little souvenirs, little vases and things. I've got lots of little vases. This is working out very well for me because of all my stuff. Here's a cartoon showing contemporary architect, very streamlined, very abstract and Sohn just full of stuff. Even his dog is highly decorated unlike modern guy's dog. He's got spindly little columns, metal columns coming down here that give you the kind of support that a real wall would have given you. So you can imagine that in its inception, this would have been a wall with maybe a door or maybe an arched opening. In Sohn's reinvention of this space, it is a swath of space cutting through from the street into the courtyard with views beyond into the museum. Fabulous. He's also playing with mirrors a lot that you both get this voiding of space and you also get the reflection which gives you the image of space rather than solid. One of the really great rooms in Sohn's house is the breakfast room. And we saw the breakfast room over here as this hinge point that takes you from this slot of space at the entry, this cone of vision slot of space and becomes the moment that realigns you to enter into the museum or to look across this series of courtyards. And the breakfast room is one of these pendentive domes. You can see the shallow pendentive dome with a big lantern in section here. But this section I think is also really useful because it shows you how that figure, how that spatial figure is positioned in the room. Skylight, skylight. Really tall vertical slot of space on each side. And think about what dome spaces are usually like. Dome spaces are usually the big vertical. You know, walk, walk, walk. Woo, dome. Walk, walk, walk. And so you wait for the dome to get the big spatial experience. Here the dome is sort of squashed down in this plenum avoided pochette that rises up and drenches the perimeter with light. Really fabulous. Here's another view of the axis cutting through and looking across to this huge tower that Sohn has in his museum bar. Breakfast room over here. Huge tower. Plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere. Because why wouldn't you want a life-sized Apollo Belvedere? That would be a good thing to have. But not just that, tons of other stuff. This is a view looking into the dome of the breakfast room. Really shallow, barely there. I mean, it's a kind of interesting surface. If you had to make a dome for a model that you were making, you would have a hard time making the Pantheon dome. But you could probably make one of these just by melting some plastic, right? As at the dome in the Bank of England where the lantern was was filled with caratids, here too this lantern is filled with little engravings, little works of art there, and mirrors, curved mirrors reflecting back on you and giving you another view of the space. This is the slot of space that zone of voided pochette that shoots up on the side of the building and that too is floor to ceiling covered with paintings. And these are the skylights that you get in that little zone just outside of the breakfast room. I'm going to read to you what Sohn says about the breakfast room because I think it's a good window into the way he thinks about architecture and it's a good way of understanding what motivates what seem to be some of these extraordinary moves. The views from this room into the monument court and into the museum, the mirrors on the ceiling, and the looking glasses combined with a variety of outline and general arrangement and the design and decoration of this limited space present a succession of those fanciful effects which constitute the poetry of architecture. Two interesting things there. One, fanciful effects, not some kind of totalizing mathematical proposition, but rather a real embrace of the picturesque. And the idea that architecture is poetic, that there is something about the nature of architecture meant to stir feelings and arouse emotions. The amazing space, the really great space, is the museum. And this is a section through the museum. This is parallel to the street filling up those three gardens. And you can see that it is a section the likes of which we have not yet seen. And the reason is that these are all skylights. These are all skylights bringing light into the space below. And it's also a section the likes of which we haven't seen because it really doesn't individuate rooms so much as levels within the space. So that if you're standing up here, you can look down here. If you're standing here, you can look here. If you're here, you can look here and see light coming out of that. So you get these big diagonal views skewering the space, but also making the space more and more and more complex because you keep seeing layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. And this section I think is also interesting because it begins to give you a sense of how he's using his museum space to organize the stuff that he has. This is a giant Egyptian sarcophagus of the mummy of Seti the first. So it is said this is a wall full of plaster casts hung floor to ceiling on a triple height space. Here's the painting room. And a nice thing about the painting room is that it sort of looks like well he's kind of controlled himself. He's just hanging paintings on the wall. But that's not really true. The paintings are on hinges. And if you go in there, you know, here's my Pusan. Here's my other Pusan. Here's my other Pusan. This is my Claude. So it's like turning pages in a book that he's got fabulous works of art hung back to front on hinges in the wall. And that if you open them all up, you get a view into this little courtyard over here. Great. This is where we have our friend the Apollo Belvedere lined up with this slot of space from the breakfast room. And over here we have the picture gallery with this little area engaging the courtyard right over there. Section through the big tower. Fabulous. And these are just some of the views you get as you're looking through the space. It's so weird. I mean we have other people trying to build the thing. Like I'm thinking of Burlington and Kent making their pathetic little pantheon. Like I was to Rome. I saw a pantheon. I'm going to make one that's 15 feet by 15 feet. No, that's not the pantheon. You do not get the sublime sense of being confronted with Romani Toss, the great architecture of antiquity by looking at this little dwarf pantheon at Chiswick. But when you come here and you get this relentless channel of space, you get a sense of the sublime. You get a sense of the overwhelming amplitude of this culture. You get a spatial equivalent that Piranesi tries to represent in his drawings. His drawings of Roman antiquities or in his capricios which in many ways look like Son's house because they're full of stuff. Or in his prisons which in many ways look like Son's house because you get a layer of a view after a layer of a view after a layer of a view. Has anybody been here? Did you lavet? Oh, extremely claustrophobic. You're a fool. You would probably be claustrophobic in a prison. Okay, well maybe we would all be claustrophobic in a prison. But don't you think that the qualities of the space in the Son's house are awfully similar to the qualities of space in the Piranesi where you are in one place looking through a place, at another place, and your path is not quite clear? I think that maybe what Stephanie means by claustrophobic is it's an awfully small place to have that much stuff in it. It's kind of overwhelming. So you'd probably be more comfortable in a Piranesi prison because they're much more spacious. These are some views across the big tower of space. Here's the Apollo Belvedere. Excellent. These are both drawings by Gandhi, the great water colorist in Son's employ. The sublime Worms Eye view looking up at the space. This is the great sarcophagus of setting the mood, Contra Luce. And this is what it looks like on the inside. It is so nuts. And there's stuff on top of stuff, on top of stuff, on top of stuff. And you have to look up to the sky to get some sense of clarity when you see these big skylights, like the skylight over here is right over here. But even when you're looking at the skylight trying to find this ideal figure that will organize the space, you see stuff glued to the wall like crazy. These are some of the big views through the space. I'm just going to try to dazzle you with the Piranesi in a sense that there is simply no possible way to know where you are when you're moving through this space. In a sense you're oriented because your eye can skewer through it and you can see where you've been, but you cannot rationally make sense out of all this density of information. So to me seems to be representing an interesting way of dealing with the burden of history. And that is not just caving and saying, I'm going to pick one, I'm going to pick another. But he's really kind of reusing history toward different ends. And the ends toward which he's using it are to get this sublime feeling and also to represent this kind of enlightenment idea of the cataloging and the quantifying and the measuring. The whole idea of the museum is a kind of enlightenment idea. So these two impulses, the impulse to be overwhelmed and to be irrational and to be dizzy with a multitude of things in front of you, comes to loggerheads with the impulse to catalog, to measure, to quantify, to collect. And it is quite cool and quite overwhelming.