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- Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
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Notes
Drawing 19 shows the existing house as a faded building in the background. The drawing proposes Design Number 1: the north front as a three-bay range flanked by single-storey wings. The wings have tripartite windows set within segmental-headed blind arches.
Drawing 20 is a design for the west front. The right-hand side shows the existing building, as refaced by Soane in 1788 (see drawings 2 to 5). Soane proposes doubling the facade to span six bays. In the built design (drawing 22), the north and west fronts are kept symmetrical.
A curving Doric veranda is at the north-west corner and the north front is obscured by trees. The built design (drawing 22) has a similar device, using an inverted north-west corner to position the west and north fronts so that they can be symmetrical and in alignment with the existing structure.
On 25 November 1801 the office was busy making drawings for the proposed alterations and additions to Cricket Lodge, including two perspectives of the elevation, each on a half sheet of royal paper (Journal No 4).
Soane recorded in the Day Books that on 25 November 1801 the office made six different plans of the principal floor, showing six variant designs. Five of these are drawings kept at the RIBA Drawings Collection, dated November 1801 (reference SA27/2(1-5)). Margaret Richardson writes that the missing drawing is probably the executed design is (M. Richardson, editor, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, S, 1976, p.100).
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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.
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).
Contents of Presentation drawings of the proposed additions and alterations, November 1801 (2)
- [19] Presentation drawing of the proposed additions and alterations, 25 November 1801
- [20] Presentation drawing of the proposed additions and alterations, November 1801