Tuesday evening’s John Soane’s Museum gala was a great evening for the assembled supporters of the London museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It started when Soane Board President Thomas Klingerman asked the audience “How many of you read The Architect’s Newspaper?” You probably saw the Eavesdrop column on Jay Z and Beyonce visiting Cuba on a Soane architecture tour (their itinerary included landmarks by architect Miguel Coylua, among others). Things are really changing at Soane! After the irrepressible Suzanne Stephens opened the program awards, inscribed Soane Foundation medallions were given to Carole Fabian, director of Avery Architecture & Arts Library at Columbia, and Barry Bergdoll for their joint acquisition of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives.
The award was presented by the architectural theorist Catherine Ingraham, who talked about her maternal grandfather Frank LLoyd Wright and his meaning to her family and architectural culture. In accepting the award, Fabian talked about the enormous organizing challenge of the huge archive and Bergdoll told the story of Wright introducing Mies van Der Rohe to a Chicago audience. In front of the crowd, Bergdoll said “I want to introduce you to Frank Lloyd Wright without whom there would be no Mies Van der Rohe!” A second award was given to Lord Norman Foster of Thames Bank by Paul Goldberger, who is finishing a book on Foster and compared his career as an architect and collector to Soane, though one with his own private airplane! Foster, for his part, woke up yesterday in London, visited the Soane Museum, then lunched with the Queen and piloted his plane to New York.
