Journal Article

Exhibitions : review : \Building a dialogue : the architect and the client\

Guillery, Peter

2015

Overview

Reviews the exhibition \"Building a dialogue : the architect and the client,\" which was held at Sir John Soane's Museum in London from 17 February-9 May 2015. This show deployed a selection from the Soane Museum's outstanding collection of architectural drawings, paintings, and other archives to explore a multifaceted theme. That theme, the relationship between the designers of buildings and those they serve, is of course central to the discipline of architectural history. In an absorbing and informative display, the exhibition shed much light, with material stretching coverage from the 16th century to the 21st. It will come as no surprise, however, that the focus was principally on the late 18th and early 19th centuries, on Soane himself, the Adam brothers, and, to a lesser extent, their contemporaries. The exhibition thus implicitly dealt with professionalization, the shifting toward fixity in that period of the figure of the architect, for whom certain modes of conduct were appropriate and toward whom clients were meant to behave in certain ways. [Revised Publication Abstract]