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Purpose
Notes
Soane's rough designs (recto): four plans and an elevation all seek to regularize the new front to the east, giving it a central entrance with 'a large window' on each side. The most ambitious plan has a bowed centre fronted by a segmental porch. The elevation shows a three-bay, two-storey front with a steep pediment over each end bay. A comparison with drawing 16, an unexecuted design of 1797, shows a similar front with a balconied porch on a square plan in the centre.
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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).