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Presentation drawings showing two alternative designs for the house and office court, January 1796 (3)

Notes

In January 1796, Soane presented to Mr Praed various designs for the office court (Journal No 3). On 2 January, he showed the client two alternative designs for the offices, including two ground floor plans and one chamber floor plan, probably drawings 77 to 79.

The office court has single-storey ranges linking raised ends, the farthest from the house having an arched entrance. Covered passages face both sides of the court, with stairs descending gradually to the basement level. The first floor, corresponding with the principal floor of the house, has four bedrooms, the steward's room and a room for Mr Praed. A passage on this floor links some of the bedrooms to the ground floor. Drawings 77 and 78 show a doorway between this passage and the breakfast room in the main house; this communication is omitted in later designs (as in drawing 81).

Drawing 79 has pencil marking the communications between the rooms in the basement of the house; these were probably made as Soane gestured with his pencil while presenting the drawing to the client.

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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 Presentation drawings showing two alternative designs for the house and office court, January 1796 (3)