Marrikka Trotter presents "Floodmarks, Casts, and Fragments: Proleptic Extinction in the Architecture of John Soane and Joseph Gandy".

In 1824, the British magazine Knight’s Quarterly published an article that lampooned Sir John Soane’s idiosyncratic approach to architectural ornament. For the authors, Soane's “Boeotian order” was a disorder that, rather than upholding the purity of architectural language, infected it with absurd references to foreign sciences. “Is he a geologist?” they asked. He “uses an interminable joint, which copies successfully the grand appearances of nature in the stratification of rocks.” This talk explores the relationship between Soane and Joseph Gandy’s novel approach to architecture -- and particularly architectural ornament -- and the catastrophist theory of the celebrated French paleontologist, Georges Cuvier. In the new context of an old earth, the real extent of geological time suddenly eclipsed the importance of Greco-Roman antiquity, and along with it, the cultural authority it had bestowed on architecture. As even the most ancient aspects of human culture were revealed to be chronologically recent compared to the vast duration of the planet, architecture seemed poised to become an exercise in proleptic ruination due to inevitable natural disasters.  At the same time, it became a privileged model for geology -- particularly for Cuvier and his rival, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This talk considers the cultural reciprocity between these two discourses and begins to document the extensive connections between Georgian architects and the founders of the earth sciences in Britain.

Marrikka Trotter is an architectural historian and theorist whose research examines the historical intersections between geology, architecture, agriculture, and landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is co-editor of the contemporary architectural theory collections Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else  (The MIT Press: 2010) and Architecture is All Over (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City: 2017), and her writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Design Magazine, Log, and AA Files. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017, and her work has received funding from the Paul Mellon Centre, the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Sir John Soane's Museum, among others. She is a full-time faculty member at SCI-Arc, where she coordinates the history and theory curriculum.