Architecture: The dome's a success

Sir John Soane

Royal Academy, London

John Soane, the architect and Royal Academician, was an irascible, insecure, self-pitying, hypersensitive man. He fell out repeatedly with his friends and colleagues and betrayed the mentor who gave him his start in life. His career was littered with libel cases, petulant pamphleteering against his rivals and bitter family disputes.

So why, more than 150 years after his death, have contemporary British architects, including Norman Foster, Michael Hopkins and Richard Rogers, queued up to fund a major retrospective of his work? Because he was also one of the most original architects this country has ever produced. Or "John Soane: Master of Space and Light" - as the Royal Academy now puts it. His deviant neo-classical architecture still has the power to speak to architects around the world who, even now, model projects on his work.

During the late 18th and early 19th century, Soane was the most acclaimed architect of his age. He was responsible for hundreds of buildings for establishment clients, and evidence of his success - drawings, paintings, models and sketches - fills four rooms of the Academy.

Among the projects exhibited are his designs for the world's first purpose- built public art gallery (the Dulwich Picture Gallery) and Soane's magnificent home at Lincoln's Inn Fields. The latter is a cabinet of curiosities writ large, stuffed with antiquarian finds and architectural quirks. He bequeathed it all to the nation on his death in 1837: the Museum was one of Britain's first public museums and remains one of the most magical.

Soane, who was knighted in 1831, was secretive about his humble origins. He was born John Soan near Reading in 1753 (he added the "e" 30 years later) and laboured for his bricklayer father before his talent was noticed by a visiting architect. The chance meeting led to a pupilage in London with the talented George Dance the Younger, and an education at the Royal Academy. He won a travel scholarship and undertook the Grand Tour, where he met the natural-born gentlemen who were to be his friends and clients in later life. He never looked back.

His education and travels served as the bones on which he hung his unique style. It was classicist, but of a nervy, sometimes morbid kind, that at its best deftly kicked the legs of convention away. Soane's buildings are characterised by spare exteriors and inward-looking spaces, with unexpected conjuctions of walls and ceiling. Often his rooms were lit from above by a lumiere mysterieuse generated by bringing in light via shallow, top-lit domes, through coloured glass and refracted by convex mirrors. But it's his domes, or "canopies" as he preferred, played out with infinite variation for which he is best known.

Soane's approach didn't always earn him praise from his conventional contemporaries - "peculiar" or "all affectation and quackery" were charges laid against him - but his unbounded ambition and deft networking ensured that his career flourished. He was also willing to make use of the latest technology, the new heating systems and WCs of the early industrial age, so it is hardly surprising that he has been dubbed this country's first modern architect.

Piers Gough, who designed the Royal Academy's exhibition, has done his subject justice in the theatrical staging of the show. The first room is dominated by a ziggurat of Soane's models, the second by reproductions of four domes for Soane's projects hanging above your head. While these are only partially successful in evoking Soane's light and space, the third room is brilliantly climactic. A dome for Soane's Bank of England, the magnum opus that was 45 years in the making, has been recreated at three-quarters scale, filling the room and sheltering a specially commissioned model of the Bank below. On a screen behind, a computer-generated virtual reality fly-through allows you to follow a path through the disturbing Byzantine secret courts and moody rotundas which Soane created behind the Bank's high walls. Unfortunately, this is now the only way of experiencing Soane's triumph because the Bank tore down all his work after the First World War to make room for Herbert Baker's bombastic replacement.

Much to his chagrin, Soane missed out on many of the major public projects of the time, such as the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament and designing Buckingham Palace (which went to John Nash). He eventually became both professor of architecture at the Royal Academy and an early president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, but, after the death of his wife, he retreated to the archaeological edifices within his Lincoln's Inn Home.

Neglected for a century, Soane's legacy lives on through modern architects, even if many of his buildings don't: their destiny follows a litany like the fate of Henry VIII's wives: bombed, demolished, desecrated, bombed, demolished, survived. And although public projects eluded him, his work is more familiar to us than we think. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's red K2 phone box, based on Soane's Dulwich Mausoleum dome and his own tomb, can be found on a street corner near you.

'': Royal Academy, W1 (0171 300 8000), to 3 December