[6] Preliminary alternative design for the south side, October 1797

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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)
      - Lothbury Court and surrounding offices, 1797-1801 (109)

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Reference number

SM volume 60/18

Purpose

[6] Preliminary alternative design for the south side, October 1797

Aspect

Perspective looking south showing design as in SM volume 60/16 but with tripartite windows to either side of the south gate and to the east a parapet

Inscribed

Designs for the Lothbury Court. Bank of England

Signed and dated

Oct^r 1797

Hand

Soane office

Notes

From its earliest stage of design, the south side of Lothbury Court took on the form of a triumphal arch. The motif gives a prominent and ceremonious character to this gateway that led into the restricted Bullion Court. In 1817 Soane lectured on the ‘indiscriminate imitation or copying of Roman triumphal arches’ and, in a passage crossed out and probably never delivered, he criticised his own misuse of the motif at Lothbury because it was ‘not for heroes to pass under but for waggons loaded with gold and silver’. Nonetheless, Soane used the motif again on the front of his house at Pitzhanger (1800-1808). Both at Pitzhanger and Lothbury Court, the executed arch consisted of columns projecting forward. The Forum of Nerva in Rome (97 AD) is the first use of columns breaking forward for purely decorative purposes.

In this drawing, SM volume 60/15, SM volume 60/16, SM volume 60/11, SM volume 60/17, SM volume 60/13, SM volume 60/12 and SM volume 60/10 the designs experiment with variations in columniation and attic. The arch form becomes less apparent; instead of a unified gateway, the elevation is reduced to a single plane disrupted only by two projecting orders. On either side of the gateway is a projecting base surmounted by columns and entablature.

Level

Drawing

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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).