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Design for a villa on a triangular plan, c.1757-8 (1)

Notes

The young Dance has chosen (or was set) to design a house on a triangular plan and quite ingeniously flattens the apex, extends the sides and makes the centre of the base segmental, so that the design looks rather like a compass in shape or, in the manner of the later architects of the Arts and Craft Movement, a butterfly. But the planning is clumsy with identical plans for both floors, awkward circulation, no provisions of a secondary stair, dressing rooms or water closets. And the draughtsmanship is uncertain, particularly in the setting out of the staircase.

An early example in England of a house on a three-sided plan was the Triangular Lodge at Rushton, Northamptonshire built as a defiant symbol of the Trinity in 1594-7. In the 18th century, of houses designed on a polygonal plan, the triangle seems to have enjoyed the greatest favour. An engraving of a section of a triangular house made before 1742 by Theodore Jacobson is an album of prints collected by the elder Dance (framed f.3). Stillman (1988, p.151) writes 'Designs for houses in ths shape by Chambers Adam, Carr, Dance (catalogued here), Carter and Nash ... are known; and some of these were carried out, including Carr's Grimston Garth Yorkshire, of 1781-6, Nash's Castle House in Aberystwyth for Uvedale Price of c.1795, and Adam's Walkingshaw House, Renfrewshire, 1791.'

LITERATURE. D Stillman, English Neoclassical architecture, 1988.

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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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Contents of Design for a villa on a triangular plan, c.1757-8 (1)