[31] Preliminary design for the rear elevation of a group of prison buildings for Edinburgh Bridewell, 1791, executed in part

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - Bridewell, Edinburgh: designs for a group of prison buildings, 1790-91, executed in part (33)
    - Variant design for a castle-style bridewell scheme, 1791, executed in part (7)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 10/153

Purpose

[31] Preliminary design for the rear elevation of a group of prison buildings for Edinburgh Bridewell, 1791, executed in part

Aspect

Rear elevation of the main bridewell building with an additional block to the right. The main building comprises a thirteen-bay wide curved building, three-storeys in height over a basement with crow-stepped gables to the rear with bartizans. The building to the right is two-storeys over a basement and five bays wide with two-bay circular outer turrets with conical roofs. Across both elevations are a mixture of plain slit windows, and slit windows in recessed arches, as well as machicolated cornices and crenelations. There is a pencil outline of an additional gable in the centre of the main prison building which matches the design in the alternative scheme SM Adam volume 33/10

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

1791
datable to 1791

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (276x97)

Hand

Possibly
Adam office hand, possibly Robert Morison, John Robertson, or John Paterson

Watermark

Crowned cartouche [in part]

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.

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