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.