[4] Preliminary design for twin-domed hall

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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 column-flue designs, November 1791 to c. March 1792 (8)

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Reference number

SM volume 74/2

Purpose

[4] Preliminary design for twin-domed hall

Aspect

Plan and laid-out elevation/sections

Scale

bar scale of 1/6 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Bank Stock Office, door into Transfer / Office, door into Vestibule, top of balustrade, (probably in Soane's hand, brown ink) Take this side, (red pen) of Bellglass, (pencil and pen) dimensions given and (verso) Plan of design for Bank Stock Office

Signed and dated

datable to December 1791 - January 1792

Medium and dimensions

Pen, pencil and sepia and burnt sienna washes on wove paper with six fold marks (537 x 656)

Hand

Attributed to Thomas Chawner or Frederick Meyer, with sketching by Soane

Notes

The twin-domed scheme shown on this sheet kept and strengthened two existing, side-by-side supports in the middle of the hall, thus creating domed areas to the north and south, carried on thick piers attached to the short walls, and with narrow side aisles along the perimeter, demarcated by counters. The southern dome's lightly red-inked plan is over drawn in Soane's hand in black ink, slightly shifted to the centre, and inscribed take this side, in brown ink, as a direction by Soane to draw up a full design based on the black-inked variation of the dome.

However, no other drawings exist of the twin-domed scheme. Though it would have amply lit the hall, the broad span of the arches would have presented structural difficulties and its binary parti went against Soane's hierarchical composition aesthetic. With this sheet, Soane may simply have wanted to try out all his options, and perhaps had been following up on the suggestion for a twin-domed hall made in one of Dance's studies, SM archive 14/80/3.

The sheet has been folded six times and identified on its outside by the verso inscription, probably for ease of storage and also transport to and from Soane's Great Scotland Yard and Bank offices.

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).