[1] Competition design No.3 with motto 'Mihi turpe relinqui est'

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Public buildings
  - London: St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Islington: unexecuted competition designs, 1777 (9)

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Reference number

SM 13/1/6

Purpose

[1] Competition design No.3 with motto 'Mihi turpe relinqui est'

Aspect

The Basement Story of a Design for a Lunatic Hospital

Scale

bar scale of 1/14 in to 1 ft

Inscribed

as above, A. Staircase for the use of the Master & Apothecarys Servants / B. d^o for the more convenient conveying the provisions to the Patients / C. d^o for the use of the Hospital / D. d^o from the Street to the Kitchen &c and rooms labelled: Cellars (3 times), Coals / 15 by 20 (twice), Coals / 15.9 by 19, Area (twice), Cutting room / 16.1½ by 19.7½, Small beer / Cellar / 17 by 23, Kitchen / 22.0 by 19.7½, Servants / room / 15.7½ by 16.9, Boiling room / 15.7½ by 16.9, Masters / Kitchen / 16.1½ by 9.1½, Pantry / 10.1½ by 9.1½, Apothecarys / Kitchen / 16.1 by 9.1½, Wet Larder / 16.1½ by 9.1½, Court, Washouse / 16.6 by 16, Passage to Staircase to Hospital. N^o3 (competition number added). Mihi turpe relinqui est [it is shameful for me to be left behind] (competition motto)

Signed and dated

datable to before 31 May 1777

Medium and dimensions

Pen and washes within a single ruled border on laid paper with one fold mark (641 x 988)

Hand

Soane?

Watermark

J Whatman

Notes

Robert Baldwin's hand can be seen in the inscribed titles as well as the rendering of the elevation and section of this drawing. It has been suggested (Professor du Prey, in conversation February 2009) that the room labels on this drawing and SM 13/1/5 were added by Soane who may have drawn the plans too. It is not uncommon to have several hands making a competition drawing.

The plan could be described as a stretched half-ellipse (cut longitudinally). The elevation has a Pantheon-type dome in the centre over a three-bay, four-storey frontispiece with three Wyatt windows, the centre one with a pair of reclining statues. The giant, two-storey windows at each end have a pair of Greek Doric columns with plain shafts and without bases.

Literature

P.du Prey, John Soane: the making of an architect, 1982. Chapter 3 (Architecture for madness: the St Luke's competition)

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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