ERASED CITY - Urban voids : ruins
The image 'bird’s eye view on the City of London in ruins' introduces the concept of the ruin as a form of destruction and refers to 'Joseph Gandy, Soane’s Bank of England in Ruins, 1830'.
Sir John Soane, one of the most renowned architects of the Bank of England, asked Joseph Gandy, a close associate, to produce a series of paintings of his designs for the Bank. The resulting series included a cut-away watercolour of the building which looks remarkably like some of the larger views of Pompeii (although the only real ruins on display are in the top right hand corner), and a romanticised ruin of the building’s dome. In Soane’s writings “Crude Hints towards the History of My House” of the 1810s, he imagines returning to his home in the 1830s to find it a dilapidated ruin. The ruins of his house can be read as the ruins of Soane’s ambitions, the failures in his personal life, whereas Gandy’s painting might suggest the temporality of architecture and their supporting financial systems .
In the current context of financial crisis, the contention of urban space, and redefining architectural theories, Gandy’s ideas about the inevitable process of time and decay suggest new meanings.