The greatest architect in active practice in the 1790s was Sir John Soane (1753-1837), from 1788 Architect of the Bank of England. The career of his master, the younger Dance, was in decline; he had made what were perhaps his greatest contributions a good quarter of a century earlier. Whatever Soane owed to Dance, and he evidently owed him a great deal, the Bank[17] offered greater opportunities than the older man had ever had. His interiors of the early nineties at the Bank leave the world of academic Classicism completely behind (Plate 3). His extant Lothbury façade of 1795, with the contiguous ‘Tivoli Corner’ of a decade later—now modified almost beyond recognition—and even more the demolished Waiting Room Court (Plate 4A) showed that his innovations in this period were by no means restricted to interiors. Soane’s style, consonant though it was in many ways with the general ideals of Romantic Classicism, is a highly personal one. At the Bank, however, he was not creating _de novo_ but committed to the piecemeal reconstruction of an existing complex of buildings, and controlled as well by very stringent technical requirements. Thus the grouping of the offices about the Rotunda, like the plan of the Rotunda itself, goes back to the work done by his predecessor Sir Robert Taylor (1714-88) twenty years earlier; while the special need of the Bank for various kinds of security made necessary both the avoidance of openings on the exterior and a fireproof structural system within. The architectural expression that Soane gave to his complex spaces in the offices which he designed in 1791 and built in 1792-4 had very much the same abstract qualities as those to which older masters of Romantic Classicism, such as Ledoux and Dance, had already aspired in the preceding decades (Plate 3). The novel treatment of the smooth plaster surfaces of the light vaults made of hollow terracotta pots, where he substituted linear striations for the conventional membering of Classical design, was as notable as the frank revelation of the delicate cast-iron framework of his glazed lanterns (see Chapter 7). These interiors have particularly appealed to twentieth-century taste, while Soane’s columnar confections of this period generally appear somewhat pompous and banal. The Rotunda of 1794-5 was grander and more Piranesian in effect; thus it shared in the international tendency of this period towards megalomania. So also the contemporary Lothbury façade, with its rare accents of crisply profiled antae and its vast unbroken expanses of flat rustication, is less personal to Soane and more in a mode that was common to many Romantic Classical architects all over the Western world. The original Tivoli Corner of 1805, however, was almost Baroque in its plasticity, with a Roman not a Greek order, and a most remarkable piling up of flat elements organized in three dimensions at the skyline that could only be Soane’s.