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The Four Per Cent Office was built basically from the same plan as the Bank Stock Office. In elevation, however, the Four Per Cent Office was different: the large arches around the main hall were semicircular while the long arms contained segmental arches, essentially an inverse of the Bank Stock Office. Doric columns supported the lantern roof rather than the iron ties of the Stock Office lantern. The decoration was also different, with ribbed pendentives and a Greek key motif incised in the pilasters. The latter ornamentation resembled the decoration of the Rotunda, designed and built simultaneously to the Four Per Cent Office.
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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).