[6] Design for a building, 1787, unexecuted

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Commercial buildings
  - White's Chocolate House, 37-8 St James's Street, London, 1787, unexecuted (9)
    - Preliminary design and designs for White's Chocolate House, 1787, unexecuted (9)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 36/1

Purpose

[6] Design for a building, 1787, unexecuted

Aspect

Elevation of a three-storey, three-bay building, with a slight incline from right to left, and rustication at ground-storey level. The central, stepped Doric portico is projecting, and contains an entrance surmounted by a fanlight, and flanked by semi-circular-headed windows. In the first and third bays there are windows set behind Doric screens. At the first-storey level there are windows set behind Ionic screens and surmounted by lunettes. The central window is set behind a balustraded, bowed, Corinthian screen, and the windows in the first and third bays have ironwork balconies, and are flanked by paired Corinthian columns. Above all this there is a frieze of festoons and ribbons. In the upper register, in the central bay, there are three windows with a pediment, set behind a bowed balustrade, and all this is surmounted by a ribbed dome. In the first and third bays there are lunette windows flanked by Doric pilasters, and the bays are surmounted by plinths supporting reclining sphinxes

Scale

bar scale of 1/4 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Whites Chocolate House / Elevation towards St. James's Street / Whites Chocolate house (pencil) / Extends 63 feet / See Sk. Vol 10. 36 (A.T. Bolton, modern curatorial hand, pencil) and some dimensions given

Signed and dated

1787
(cropped) m Architect 1787.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and wash on laid paper (608 x 529)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Verso

9 designs

Watermark

JWHATMAN; Fleur-de-lis within a crowned cartouche

Literature

Bolton, 1922, Volume II, Index, p. 50
Sheppard, 1960, pp. 457-58
King, 2001, Volume II, p. 57, pl. 57
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

Level

Drawing

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.

Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).