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  • image SM (7) 10/5/3

Reference number

SM (7) 10/5/3

Purpose

Design for the basement, 8 January 1798

Aspect

7 Plan of the Basement Floor of the Library

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

as above, The Bank of England, and dimensions given

Signed and dated

  • Bank Janry 8th 1793

Hand

Soane office

Notes

Drawing 7 shows the library as built by Robert Taylor. The drawing dates from after the demolition of the library, however, suggesting it was a record or it was used in the construction of the new library. The materials from the old library were all reused in the new building of similar dimensions and construction. Drawings of Taylor's library show square supportive piers supporting square cross-vaults of equal size while Soane's library contained cross-vaults of variant sizes and T-shaped supportive piers. Taylor's library also showed thermal windows on its north elevation.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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).