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  • image SM volume 75/97

Reference number

SM volume 75/97

Purpose

[10] Presentation drawing showing variant design, May 1797

Aspect

Section; half-ground floor plan; and half-plan of the clerestory

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

The Bank of England, The Rotunda

Signed and dated

  • John Soane Arch., Lincolns Inn Fields May 23d 1794

Hand

Soane office

Notes

This drawing, SM volume 75/96 and SM volume 75/98 were presented to the Building Committee on 29 May 1794 as designs for the Rotunda. As noted in the inscription, SM volume 75/98 was approved for building & ordered to be executed with '/ all possible expedition'. The design was presented only two weeks after the Building Committee had decided to rebuild. The three drawings vary only slightly in design. This drawing shows a smaller door added to the plan, and the elevation includes a second layer of wall supporting half of a semicircular arch; the purpose for these inclusions is unknown. All three drawings show the hall's interior decoration but it was the building's construction and basic form that concerned the Committee and architect at this early stage of design.

See SM M606 for a model of part of the Rotunda, showing the masonry courses.

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).