The mirror and the crèche: techniques for building and collapsing the world

Abstract

In 1833, Sir John Soane, the British architect and antiquarian, bequeathed his house-museum, containing over 3,000 inventoried artifacts, to the British nation by a private act of Parliament. A century and a half later, in 1978, the American architect and industrial designer Alexander Girard gifted his global collection of 106,000 folk art objects to the state of New Mexico; a bequest of such magnitude that it expanded the provincial holdings of the Museum of International Folk Art fivefold. These men, as divergent as they were, in bearing and aesthetic disposition, amassed two of the most extensive and culturally significant collections in the world. What follows is an exploration of the experiences that seeded and positioned the role of collecting in the lives of these designers, and the revolutionary spatial effects that we have inherited as a result; how travel, longing, world-building, and forays into fiction shaped their impulse to collapse the world; and how the cultural and technological regimes of their eras shaped both the manner and matter of their collections.

Keywords:

• World building
• fiction
• collecting
• John Soane
• Alexander Girard

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather Scott Peterson

Heather Scott Peterson is an artist, designer, writer, and educator living and working in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, with a concentration in creative writing at Brown University, and a MArch from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Her multidisciplinary practice explores material histories and the syntax of matter. In 2014 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship, and has been a member of the viewing program at The Drawing Center in New York since 2007. She is an Associate Professor of Interior Design at Woodbury University. Email: [email protected]