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  • image SM D3/4/5
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Reference number

SM D3/4/5

Purpose

Bowood, Wiltshire, c.1794

Aspect

[10] Plans and section of a compound beam

Scale

½ in to 1 ft?

Inscribed

Plan of the top of Beam, Plan of the great Principal in its position but disengaged from the Beam, Plan of the upper part of the Beam shewing the parts of Principal, above it BBBB & Tye pieces CCCCCC extending to the Walls D & Notched on the / Plates & bolted to the / Beam, Section of the Beam lengthwise, Section of the Beam at A cut across it and labelled A, B, C, D and E

Signed and dated

  • c.1794

Medium and dimensions

Pen, burnt umber and warm sepia washes, pencil on wove paper (285 x 510)

Hand

Dance

Notes

If the scale is ½ inch to 1 foot, then the beam measures just under 22 feet in length and may be related to the structure of the lantern for the Octagon Staircase which is 24 feet wide.

David Yeomans (correspondence, 2 August 2001) wrote '... part of a king post truss with raised tie beams. The term beam was used in the eighteenth century to mean the beams across the wall plates, ie the tie beams of the roof trusses. I note that the other members referred to on the drawing are the "principals" ie principal rafters. We do not have the bottom of the principal rafters shown but my interpretation of this is as follows: with the centre part of the tie and the principals cut in this way, the truss could have been assembled with the king post (for which there is a mortice). Once in position the additional lengths of the tie beam (marked C on the drawing) could be bolted in to complete the beam - whose function was to tie the top of the walls together. But what a complicated way of doing it.'

Level

Drawing

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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