[56] Preliminary design for a section through a building, c.1787, executed to a variant design

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Culzean Castle, Ayrshire: designs for additions to a castle-style building and its stables and walled gardens, along with a home farm, viaduct, and interior decoration and furniture for David Kennedy, 10th Earl of Cassilis, c.1776-87, executed in part (57)
    - Designs for additions to Culzean Castle, 1787, as executed (13)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 1/35

Purpose

[56] Preliminary design for a section through a building, c.1787, executed to a variant design

Aspect

Axial section through a castle-style house, from south to north, showing a three-storey building with garrets in three of the pitched roofs, and a part-elevation of one of the crenelated corner turrets. Towards the centre of the section is a large three-storey staircase lit by a skylight and supported by piers, followed by columns of the Doric and Ionic orders on each floor consecutively. There is an additional staircase sketched in pencil to the right on the ground floor, with an apsed space on the floor above. There are also sketches of chimneypieces in the north-end rooms on the ground and first floors

Scale

to a scale

Signed and dated

c.1787
datable to c.1787

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (320x203)

Hand

Probably
Robert Adam

Watermark

PORTAL & BRIDGES

Notes

The first-floor Doric capitals were replaced with Corinthian capitals when executed and are thought to have been constructed after Adam’s death, as they lack Adam’s standard of craftsmanship.

Literature

Bolton, 1922, p. 8
Harris, 2002, p. 322-327
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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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