Preliminary design for upper-rooms (2)

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - Bank of England, City of London for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, 1788-1834 (1352)
    - 1791-1801 Rebuilding of offices in the east wing and north-east extension (430)
      - Bank Stock Office, 1791-1793 (73)
        Preliminary upper-rooms designs, c. March 1792 (2) seen jl

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Reference number

SM (9) volume 74/31 (10) volume 74/26

Purpose

Preliminary design for upper-rooms (2)

Aspect

9 Longitudinal section looking east 10 Longitudinal section looking west

Scale

(9) to a scale (10) bar scale of ¼ inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

9 (pencil) some dimensions given 10 (pencil) range of Cornice in front Entablature, some dimensions given

Signed and dated

(9-10) datable to early March 1792

Medium and dimensions

(9) Pen, pencil, pale red ink, sepia and pale blue washes, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper with two fold marks (500 x 639) (10) pen, pencil, pale red ink, sepia and pale blue washes on wove paper with two fold marks (504 x 628)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

Drawing 9 is the first in this set of drawings depicting Soane's scheme to place a pair of upper-storey rooms above the hall's east and west side-arms, including one behind the shaded, segmental lunette in the centre of his sheet. The upper-room scheme is best represented in drawing 4.
Drawings 9 and 10 are closely related. Sketches on drawing 9 reduce the height of the pilaster piers, and places a parapet at the base of the end-bay lunettes to make segmental arches. There are further rough sketches for the design of the central lantern. These alterations appear fully drawn out in drawing 10. Penciling in the left lunette, including a broad X, appears to indicate Soane's uncertainty about how to handle this part of the design. The addition of the upper-rooms lowers the end-bay vaults below the level of the lunettes, as shown in drawing 10, making the segmental lunettes obsolete except for lighting new upper passages over the hall's corners leading into the upper rooms. The broad, segmental lunette in the centre of the drawing would have lit the upper room over the hall's western arm.
The glazing of the lantern and the fan-lighting of the lunettes also relates drawing 9 to drawing 7, a column-flue design. Drawing 10 also shows the glazing and the truss-work of the lantern, though not precisely as executed.

Literature

(10) J. Summerson, 'The evolution of Soane's Bank Stock Office in the Bank of England', The unromantic castle, 1990, p. 154 (10) ill. 133

Level

Drawing

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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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