Michael Landy draws famous buildings as ruins for London show

The Bank of England lies in ruins. The New York Stock Exchange is crumbling too. Artist Michael Landy has drawn both that way for Future Ruins, a new series on show at the Sir John Soane's Museum in London.

The series is made up of detailed drawings and watercolours that catch famous and lesser-known buildings in the middle of falling apart, Landy told The Art Newspaper. The subjects include the Bank of England, the Soane's Museum itself, the New York Stock Exchange, the Mar-a-Lago Club, Chatsworth House and the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Nothing is spared.

Landy has mixed the landmarks with far more personal addresses. The series also pictures his family home in Ilford, Essex, as a ruin, alongside the art supply shop he used as a student.

The starting point was already on the museum's walls. Landy began with a watercolour by Joseph Michael Gandy that reimagined the Bank of England as a ruin, a work held by the Soane's Museum. Gandy made the image in the 19th century for the museum's founder, architect John Soane, as a vision of his new Bank building as it might look centuries later.

The exhibition, titled Michael Landy: Future Ruins, opens at the Soane's Museum on 14 October 2026 and runs to 17 January 2027, according to the Sir John Soane's Museum. The museum says the show will bring together new and recent work.

For anyone dropping in, this means a walk between two versions of the same place. You see the museum's crowded rooms as they are, then Landy's version of the building coming down with the rest.