Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  [9] Preliminary working drawing, April 1803
  • image SM volume 73/5

Reference number

SM volume 73/5

Purpose

[9] Preliminary working drawing, April 1803

Aspect

Ground floor plan showing (Soane) preliminary design for ornamentation of the corridor

Scale

to a scale

Inscribed

(Soane) Windlass, Qy / 12 feet high, Porter Lodge, Court

Signed and dated

  • April 5: 1803

Hand

Soane office and Soane

Notes

This drawing and SM volume 73/13 show the Accountants Office, the Waiting Room Court the Princes Street entrance (Doric Vestibule) and the corridors and offices surrounding. The offices at the east end of the loggia were already built (distinguished in grey wash in SM volume 73/13) and the designs show an attempt to integrate the existing offices with the new buildings. The loggia is on an axis with the recess of the existing Accountants Office, leaving the Discount Office slightly askew to the rectilinear Waiting Room Court. The rooms to the north-east are part of the Deputy Accountant's residence. The Cash Book Office was located to the south of the Accountant's Office but the site is rebuilt as a narrow court beside an office with three windows.

Variant preliminary designs for the Waiting Room Court and the Doric Vestibule are included in the two drawings. The drawing shown here has windows between the loggia and the Waiting Room Court and SM volume 73/5 shows piers. In later designs, the separation is achieved by a screen of columns whereas the built loggia incorporated four pairs of coupled antae.

The final design for the Doric Vestibule included two paired columns in both the north and south recesses, and paired columns at the entrance and the east end of the Vestibule. The stair to the east of the Vestibule was, in the final design, moved south of the entrance (thereby mirroring the stair at the north side of the entrance hall).

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).