The son of a bricklayer, Sir John Soane (1753–1837) ascended to stardom as an English architect who worked in the Neo-Classical style. When we look at later neoclassicists, the composer Igor Stravinsky, for example, or the choregrapher George Balanchine, we see that modernity is in the neoclassical bloodsteam. And so this exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum London gets right to the point, looking at Soane through the prism of modernism and letting his work converse with the designs of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ernö Goldfinger. —Laura Jacobs