Royal College of Surgeons, 41-42 (now 35-43) Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn, Camden, London, 1805-12 (with James Lewis)

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George Dance office drawings: the drawings of George Dance the Elder and George Dance the Younger
- Public buildings (3)
  - Royal College of Surgeons, 41-42 (now 35-43) Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn, Camden, London, 1805-12 (with James Lewis) (226). Survey drawings, preliminary designs, design and working drawings

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Reference number

SM D5/3/18

Purpose

Royal College of Surgeons, 41-42 (now 35-43) Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn, Camden, London, 1805-12 (with James Lewis)

Aspect

[154] Section showing composite beam with iron butterfly cantilever, and decoration of the ceiling, and plan of composite beam showing timber and iron and method of bolt fixing, 'not executed'

Scale

Scale ½ Inch to the Foot

Inscribed

as above, Not executed like this drawing / The iron Truss is diferent / The Coffers in Circular Sofite are omitted in the work, some dimensions given and (verso, Dance) Section lengthway / of part of Museum / not correct and Incorrect / Section / lengthway / Museum Verso Rough interior perspective of part of museum showing junction of dome and piers Pencil

Signed and dated

1805-12

Medium and dimensions

Pen, yellow, raw umber, sepia, pink and blue washes, pencil, partly pricked for transfer on laid paper (515 x 660)

Hand

Dance

Watermark

D&CBxX in cartouche surmounted by fleur-de-lis

Notes

The iron, tapered butterfly cantilever, 14 feet long, strapped to two 14 by 6 inch timbers and supported by a compound pier in its centre was to run lengthwise of the museum across the edge of the gallery. Dance roughed in a butterfly cantilever on [SM D5/3/37].

David Yeomans (correspondence, 2 August 2001) notes that 'this design is different [from preceding designs] and raises the question of a possible difference between intended and actual behaviour. Girders were often trussed with three pieces of timber, the top one being horizontal. It looks as if Dance was doing this with iron but allowing the timber of the girder to act as the central compression part. Of course it would not have worked this way. With the arrangement shown the iron would have acted as a double cantilever effectively reducing the span of the timber. The question is what would happen to the negative moments in the iron flitches. It is all right for those between the two beams as shown here because a load on one beam would be picked up by a transfer of moments to the adjacent beam. The question is, what happens at the ends?'

Level

Drawing

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).