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- datable to 1792-93
At the top of the drawing, the plan runs through a stone course just below the four large impost blocks buttressing the central and clerestory arches. The tie rods help brace the lateral force of these arches by tying together the tops of the corner bays' four piers and also binding the lintels running between them. At the bottom of the drawing, the plan has been taken at a slightly higher line, at the top of the four large impost blocks. Here the tie rods are set directly into the blocks, bracing them against the thrust of the upper arches. However, the tie rods at this level run along only three sides of the corner bays, omitting the inner face through the clerestory lunettes.
In the corner of the bays' roofs appear to be drains that may be connected to the piping depicted in drawings 17-18 and 22, running across the upper zone of the hall's long east and west walls. Numbers inscribed in the vaulting and the framing lintels of each of the bays (No. 36 and 39) may refer to types of bricks or blocks.
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).