Final Methodologies Essay, Day 1

 

Soane

I began my Architectural Histories Methodologies essay today (as the title would imply).  At the moment, I’m still having difficulty.  I wrote five pages, my goal for the day, and got a bit further along with my total conceptualization, but I’m still sort of lost.  I’m writing on Charles Moore, John Soane, and their adherence (accidental or purposeful) to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime.  With Soane, the theory is impossibly easy to apply.  And even Moore said he felt “a greater affinity to Soane than any other architect in history.”  But what’s difficult is really supporting my case.  And supporting my case for twenty pages.  As always, evidence presents a significant hurdle.  Tomorrow morning I’m going over to the Moore house to photograph the siting (Thanksgiving’s the best day to be a creepy art historian with a camera, right?) and I know those pictures will help, but I still question whether or not what I’m doing will actually do any good.  Am I making a point no one’s made before?

What is encouraging is how much fun this whole thing’s been to research.  I knew I loved John Soane, but I had no idea to what extent.  He and I share a lot of the same views and his interpersonal relationships were completely bizarre and wonderful to study.  For any interested in Soane’s utterly riveting life and work, I highly recommend Gillian Darley’s John Soane: An Accidental Romantic (Yale University Press, 1999).  While the book could have a bit more contextualization in order to suit my taste, it’s a really thorough and impressive work of scholarship on a figure too often ignored in architecture.

Writing this paper is funny considering my own development as a historian.  I always thought I’d want to write on either Central/Eastern European high modernism or American postmodernism.  So here I am, smack in the middle of my first graduate seminar with my first paper truly on any topic of my choosing.  What do I choose but a British romantic classicist and an American postmodernist?  And I find myself lavishing far too much attention on Soane?  I would never guess the way these things would develop.

Watching the Peaks at night.

 

 

In writing on the sublime so much today, I found myself affected by it this evening.  I was at Bookstop’s going-out-of-business-sale and browsing a volume titled Britain from the Air or some such.  The book contained several beautiful aerial photos of Britain’s countryside, including a few shots from the breathtakingly gorgeous Derbyshire.  I spent the first half of this year in Sheffield in South Yorkshire (the county just north of Derbyshire).  My room gazed out into the peaks and I found my emotions utterly arrested by the rolling vistas of the Peak District.  I want to go back, I thought, I want to live in that sublimity once more.  It’s just sort of funny.  After all day long reading and the better part of this year living the sublime, of course I fall victim to it in an urban, badly lit bookstore.

Burke would certainly have something to say about that… especially the lighting.