At the core of the temple God was represented by an empty space. But let's come back to earth, or at least the Breakfast Room of the Soane Museum. Here, on a mirror-topped table in one of the most beautiful rooms in any house anywhere in the world, sits a collection of exquisite models of Libeskind's buildings. This is a lovely conceit. Here the originals' complexity is reduced into miniatures that appear to be realised in gold and silver, bronze and lead.
Big buildings sit happily inside a small breakfast parlour.
This breakfast room is, you may have guessed, the perfect setting for an exhibition of Libeskind's work. The museum, with its phantasmagorical collection of architectural models and plaster casts, is, on one level, a kind of cross-section or representation of Soane's poetic mind. It contains multitudes, a play of spaces that inspire as well as deceive. Libeskind's architecture is similarly complex, and the visitors' book at the Soane suggests that those encountering his ideas, his drawings, his models, are either uncritical enthusiasts or baffled sceptics. Of course, Libeskind has been influenced by many of the great architects of the 20th century.