The Golden Arcade

About this work

The Golden Arcade is a neoclassical arcade drawn as a glowing gold blueprint on black. Three tall arches open between pairs of columns, and at the centre a lit doorway shines like a lamp left on. Fine construction lines and measuring grids cross the night-dark ground, so the building reads both as a finished façade and as a drawing still in progress.

Arcades – rows of arches carried on columns or piers – run from Roman basilicas through Renaissance loggias to the neoclassical façades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Architects worked them out on paper long before a stone was laid. The blueprint itself dates from 1842, when John Herschel discovered the cyanotype process; for about a century, plans were copied as white lines on blue. Here the idea is turned around: gold on black, the drawing table at night.

As architecture art it suits a study, a home office, a hallway or a dining room with charcoal, deep green or warm white walls. The wide 16:9 format sits well above a sofa or sideboard, and on a 4K TV or Samsung Frame the black ground melts into the screen so the gold lines seem to float. Pair it with The Floating Gallery for a classical-and-modern architecture wall.