Sir John Soane's Museum in London has opened Michael Landy: Future Ruins, the first gathering of the artist's drawings of iconic buildings in ruins, on view from October 14, 2026 to January 17, 2027. The exhibition returns Landy to the institution that first set the series in motion.

The starting point is Joseph Michael Gandy's 1798 watercolour Architectural Ruins: A Vision, commissioned by Soane himself, which pictures his Bank of England as a Roman ruin. Landy first encountered the work in the museum and began his own painstaking drawings in response. Now Gandy's original hangs in the same building alongside Landy's versions — including his own rendering of the Bank of England hollowed out, a Union Jack still flying over the decaying facade, and a new vision of the Soane museum itself in ruins.

Recent works extend the series across a charged map of power and memory. Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago appears as an abandoned shell in watercolour and pen; the New York Stock Exchange, Chatsworth House and Rome's Palazzo della Civiltà — the fascist-era monument to Mussolini — are drawn in similar states of collapse. Alongside these sit more intimate subjects from Landy's childhood, from his favourite art supplies shop to his family home in Ilford, the grand and the personal sharing the same fate.

The drawings continue Landy's decades-long scrutiny of capitalism, consumerism and destruction, and of the emotions buildings carry as they pass from grandeur to decay, where loss gives way to nostalgia. The museum presents the works as confirming his standing as one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of his generation.