The Georgian architect John Soane would have found a lot to enjoy in the curious artwork that stage and gig designer Es Devlin has created in his even more curious home. Soane started out as a bricklayer, went on to design Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Bank of England, and bequeathed Britain his delirious one-man museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He also built the delightfully odd Pitzhanger Manor in west London where Devlin has installed an epic 3D map of world history.
Devlin’s Memory Palace is a railway modeller’s paradise. Using cut bamboo, she has created a capacious warped pale-grey landscape that curves all around you, covered in buildings and mountains and even the sacred fig tree under which Siddhartha sat. Her sprawling diorama is ordered chronologically not topographically – it’s a map of time, not space – so the Buddha’s tree is located near the Athenian Acropolis where, Devlin points out on a printed key, Socrates taught. Up near the ceiling are the pyramids of Giza, and in front of a skyscraper island stands the Statue of Liberty.
But Devlin wants you to look at the smaller buildings, the apparently anonymous rooftops. Her written key directs you to such otherwise indistinguishable landmarks as the house in Kirkcaldy where Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, or the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Even in the pyramids, she urges us to remember the workers who built them. So this is a memory palace that asks you to look beyond the monuments of kings to see the ideas and acts of courage that change the world.
As you stand on a narrow walkway surrounded by this perspective-shifting panorama of historical geography, the entire curvy relief tableau is reflected by a mirrored wall and ceiling that multiply its details. It’s only after looking around Soane’s house and coming back again that you fully appreciate how Devlin is paying homage to her host, who died in 1837. Soane bought and rebuilt Pitzhanger Manor partly because he’d worked as a labourer on the original 18th-century house – part of which he kept, alongside his strange new structure with columns and caryatids on its sublime facade and a hall that’s as grand as a baroque church. Inside, he used his trademark infinity mirrors, richly painted walls and coloured glass to create the surreal optical effects he loved. Soane was good friends with JMW Turner; his architecture manipulates light just as Turner’s paintings do.
Devlin appreciates this. Her use of mirrors to enlarge her installation is a nice nod to Soane’s optical art. So is her depiction of history as a succession of architectural styles. The contrasting masterpieces that stand out in this panorama of time – from Hagia Sophia to the world’s largest array of solar panels in modern Morocco – represent human progress and diversity in the same way Soane loved to do. When he built Pitzhanger, he even created fake Roman ruins for visitors to contemplate and meditate on time and death. Like other parts of the building, they were stupidly demolished in modern times. I’d love to see the ruins restored as immaculately as the rest of the house has been.
Beyond this, Devlin is paying tribute to an artist who used architecture to create poetry and drama. This is what she does herself in her rightly famous performance designs, from Adele to Don Giovanni. This is a dialogue between two artists who find magic and poetry in the structures we inhabit: where Soane turned his own house into an art installation, Devlin builds shifting stage architectures that carry huge weights of imagery and emotion.
My only regret is that her intervention at Pitzhanger is comparatively modest: it could stand some whizz-bang lighting, video and music. Then again, the stilled silence of this history of the world may be appropriate in every sense. Our time is melancholy. She urges you in her final note: “remember the low-laying deltas where rising seas are being first felt.” The muted tone fits the sadness of Soane, too. The man who built his own ruins and had gargoyles in his dining room shared Devlin’s sense of history as a whispering of ghosts.
• At Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London, from 26 September to 12 January.
