Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Edinburgh (Royal) High School, High School Yards: designs for a school, 1776-77, unexecuted (8)

Browse

Purpose

Edinburgh (Royal) High School, High School Yards: designs for a school, 1776-77, unexecuted (8)

Notes

Edinburgh (Royal) High School is thought to have originated from a seminary for Holyrood Abbey founded in the twelfth century. This school was located in several buildings until 1578 when a new school building was constructed on the former site of Blackfriars Monastery, to the south of Cowgate. In 1734 Robert Adam attended school here from the age of six, the curriculum being taught entirely in Latin.

The increased number of pupils made the existing building redundant and in 1774, it was decided to demolish the school to make way for a new building on the same site. In 1776-77, the Adam office made designs for a new high school building which included two variant designs. These designs were not executed, and the contract was given to another architect, Alexander Laing, in 1777.

Literary references: A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index, p.11; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume 2, p. 55; H. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840, fourth edition, 2008, p. 625; J. Fleming, Robert Adam and his circle, 1978, pp. 77-78

Louisa Catt, 2023

Level

Scheme

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).  


Contents of Edinburgh (Royal) High School, High School Yards: designs for a school, 1776-77, unexecuted (8)