Preliminary design and finished drawings for a viewing tower, 1759-60, unexecuted (6)

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire: designs for landscape architecture, alterations to the house, and interior design for Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 5th Baronet (created Lord Scarsdale 1761), 1759-72 (149)
    - Designs for buildings within the park, including a boat house, garden hut, garden pavilion, stables, farm offices, greenhouse, viewing tower, bridge, gateway, milestone, pheasant house, parsonage house, farm house and inn

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Preliminary design and finished drawings for a viewing tower, 1759-60, unexecuted (6)

Notes

If the viewing tower had been executed it would have been 84 1/2 feet high, and according to Harris was a classical variant on the 78 foot high Gothic Brizlee Tower at Alnwick (1777). There is an elevation and section drawing for the viewing tower in the Kedleston drawings collection, and a model of the structure was sent to Kedleston by Adam, though sadly this does not survive.

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Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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.

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Contents of Preliminary design and finished drawings for a viewing tower, 1759-60, unexecuted (6)