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Aberdeen Record House, Aberdeen: unexecuted designs for the building, 1772 (4)

Signed and dated

  • 1772

Notes

In 1772 Robert Adam was commissioned to make designs for a new public record house in Aberdeen. It was probably intended for a site in Marischal Street which the town council had chosen in 1770. The scheme was not executed.

Much later, in 1822-23, an alternative record house was built at 27 King Street to designs by John Smith (1781-1852). This was constructed separately from its two neighbours at numbers 29 and 31, but the three buildings form a single cohesive façade. The building is now used as offices.

Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index p. 1; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 53; British listed buildings online: '27, 29, 31 King Street, Aberdeen'

Frances Sands, 2013

Level

Scheme

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.

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Contents of Aberdeen Record House, Aberdeen: unexecuted designs for the building, 1772 (4)