[9] Preliminary design for upper-rooms

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Bank of England
  - Bank of England, City of London for the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, 1788-1834 (1356)
    - 1791-1801 Rebuilding of offices in the east wing and north-east extension (431)
      - Bank Stock Office, 1791-1793 (73)
        Preliminary upper-rooms designs, c. March 1792 (4)

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Reference number

SM volume 74/31

Purpose

[9] Preliminary design for upper-rooms

Aspect

Longitudinal section looking east

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

(pencil) some dimensions given

Signed and dated

datable to early March 1792

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil, pale red ink, sepia and pale blue washes, partly pricked for transfer on wove paper with two fold marks (500 x 639)

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This drawing is the first in this set of drawings depicting Soane's scheme to place a pair of upper-storey rooms above the hall's east and west side-arms, including one behind the shaded, segmental lunette in the centre of his sheet. The upper-room scheme is best represented in SM volume 74/2.

The drawing is closely related to SM volume 74/26. Sketches on the drawing shown here reduce the height of the pilaster piers, and places a parapet at the base of the end-bay lunettes to make segmental arches. There are further rough sketches for the design of the central lantern. These alterations appear fully drawn out in SM volume 74/26. Penciling in the left lunette, including a broad X, appears to indicate Soane's uncertainty about how to handle this part of the design. The addition of the upper-rooms serves to lower the end-bay vaults below the level of the lunettes, as shown in SM volume 74/26, making the segmental lunettes obsolete except for lighting new upper passages over the hall's corners leading into the upper rooms. The broad, segmental lunette in the centre of the drawing would have lit the upper room over the hall's western arm.

The glazing of the lantern and the fan-lighting of the lunettes also relates this drawing to SM volume 74/16, a column-flue design. SM volume 74/26 also shows the glazing and the truss-work of the lantern, though not precisely as executed.

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.

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).