[28] Design for Briesley (or Brizlee) Tower, 1777, as executed

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Country houses
  - Alnwick Castle, Northumberland: designs for interior decoration and buildings in the park for the 1st Duke of Northumberland, 1769-83 (36)
    - Preliminary designs and designs for Briesley Tower (popularly known as Brizlee Tower), 1777, Adam volumes 19/156-158 as executed (4)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 19/156

Purpose

[28] Design for Briesley (or Brizlee) Tower, 1777, as executed

Aspect

Ground plan and elevation of the principal front of a Gothic viewing tower; containing a central spiral staircase; and with a projecting ground storey, with a three-bay screens of fluted columns supporting ogee arches, alternating with single bays articulated by fluting and banded engaged columns, and containing ogee niches. The projecting ground storey is surmounted by a balustrade of fluting and enclosed rosettes, forming a first-storey viewing platform; above which is a three-storey octagonal tower with arched windows. This tower is surmounted by a balustrade of enclosed rosettes, forming a fourth-storey viewing platform, above which is a smaller, single-storey tower, surmounted by a large gadrooned vessel

Scale

bar scale of 2 ¼ inches to 10 feet

Inscribed

Design of a Tower for Briesley / (and in pencil) 1 pair / 2 pair / 3 pair / 4 pair / 5t pair and some measurements given in pencil and various elements are inscribed with pencil letters

Signed and dated

1777
1777

Medium and dimensions

Pen and pencil on laid paper (407 x 618)

Hand

Adam office hand, either Joseph Bonomi or Robert Adam

Watermark

PVL

Literature

Fleming, 1958, p. 79
Beard, 1978, p. 51
For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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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