Sir John Soane's Museum

What is a Living Exhibition?

Among the world's great small museums, Sir John Soane's at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields holds a singular place, for it is not merely a collection housed within a building but a building that is itself a work of architecture, filled with paintings, antiquities, architectural models, and the extraordinary alabaster sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I, all preserved exactly as Soane left them when he bequeathed the house and its contents to the nation in 1837, stipulating that nothing should ever be changed.

A living exhibition gives voices to such a collection. Each figure below is a simulacrum, a cognitive reconstruction drawn from the historical record, from letters, diaries, published works, architectural drawings, and the objects themselves, capable of sustaining the kind of conversation one might have had with the person, or indeed the object, in question.

Select a figure to begin a conversation.

This demonstration is inspired by Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Universitas Scholarium is not affiliated with Sir John Soane's Museum. Colour palette follows the Museum's visual identity.

Sir John Soane

Architect · 1753–1837

Born the son of a bricklayer, he rose to become architect of the Bank of England and professor at the Royal Academy, building always with light, so that every room became a meditation on how illumination enters a space, and his museum-house at Lincoln's Inn Fields remains his masterwork, architecture rendered as autobiography.

Talk to Sir John

13 Lincoln's Inn Fields

Object Simulacrum · 1792–present

Though it appears from the street to be three separate houses, it is in truth one proposition made of rooms, in which every wall, every mirror, and every borrowed view has been placed with deliberate intent, so that the building becomes the exhibit that contains all other exhibits, and here, as an object simulacrum, the building itself speaks.

Talk to The House

Joseph Michael Gandy

Soane's Draughtsman · 1771–1843

He was the prophetic renderer who painted Soane's buildings as ruins before they were even finished, holding that a building which cannot imagine its own dissolution has not yet understood its purpose, and though he died in an asylum in Devon, his renderings have outlived every building he drew.

Talk to Gandy

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Imaginary Architect · 1720–1778

He built more upon copper plates than any architect ever built in stone, for the Carceri d'Invenzione are impossible prisons obeying their own geometry, and his Vedute of Rome preserved the ancient city more precisely than any survey, so that Soane, who collected his prints as foundational documents of architectural imagination, kept them always close at hand.

Talk to Piranesi

William Hogarth

Painter & Engraver · 1697–1764

He invented the moral narrative in paint, composing in A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, and Marriage A-la-Mode those sequential pictures which tell the stories of human folly with such savage precision that the viewer, proceeding from canvas to canvas, watches ruin unfold as if observing a life compressed into eight frames. Soane owned the original paintings of A Rake's Progress, displayed in a picture room with hinged walls that fold open like the pages of a book.

Talk to Hogarth

Giovanni Belzoni

Explorer & Archaeologist · 1778–1823

Known in his time as the Great Belzoni, he was by turns a strongman, a hydraulic engineer, and a tomb-raider who opened the second pyramid of Giza, discovered the entrance to Abu Simbel, and removed the sarcophagus of Seti I from the Valley of the Kings, bringing it to London where Soane purchased it after the British Museum had refused, and who died of dysentery en route to Timbuktu at the age of forty-five.

Talk to Belzoni

Sarcophagus of Seti I

Object Simulacrum · c. 1279 BCE

Carved from a single block of translucent alabaster and inscribed with the Book of Gates and passages from the Amduat, it was built to carry Pharaoh Seti I through the twelve hours of the night, and though it was removed by Belzoni in 1817 and purchased by Soane in 1824 for two thousand pounds, and though it has stood in the basement of 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields for two hundred years, what it is has not changed, for it remains the vessel.

Talk to The Sarcophagus

About This Exhibition

This is a technology demonstration by Universitas Scholarium, conceived to show how simulacra might extend museum collections into conversational experiences, each simulacrum being a cognitive reconstruction shaped by the same materials that shaped the original mind.

Gandy does not think as Piranesi thinks, because they were different men who saw architecture differently, and the sarcophagus does not think as Belzoni thinks, because the one is a vessel three thousand years old and the other a nineteenth-century adventurer.

The real Sir John Soane's Museum is at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London. Admission is free. Visit it.

What is a Living Exhibition?

The Architect & His House

The Visionaries

The Painter

The Sarcophagus & The Explorer

About This Exhibition