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Preliminary designs for remodelling Buckingham House and its entrance gate, c1761-63, unexecuted (6)

Notes

In this design Adam was taking Buckingham house as it existed, and doubling its size by extending the pavilions and closing the courtyard with an additional range. Tait notes that he was trying to balance the building both externally and internally, by creating different apartments for the King, Queen, and Prince of Wales. According to Bolton, Adam never took his plan for Buckingham House beyond the rough preliminary designs in the Soane collection as 'he must have felt that counter influences were too strong', but this is incorrect as we know that there is a presentation drawing for Adam's proposed scheme in the collection at Hovingham Hall. Moreover, according to Tait, Adam's scheme for remodelling the principal (east) front differed little from Chambers's executed design, suggesting that Chambers may have been aware of Adam's scheme.

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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 designs for remodelling Buckingham House and its entrance gate, c1761-63, unexecuted (6)