[13] Design for three-stage attic feature on the south front, 26 August 1823

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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)
    - 1817-1833 Rebuilding of offices in the south-east and the façade, temporary office spaces and presentation drawings (221)
      - East, south and west façades, 1823-1828 (54)

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Reference number

SM 10/2/5

Purpose

[13] Design for three-stage attic feature on the south front, 26 August 1823

Aspect

Plan of the base and plan of the middle stage

Scale

bar scale

Inscribed

The Bank of England, Design for part of Attic / south front and dimensions given

Signed and dated

26^th August / 1823

Hand

Soane office

Notes

Four of these attic features were to surmount the south wall, to be aligned with the blind Vitruvian doors at either end of the colonnades. They were not included in the final design. Construction on the walls began in August 1823, the date of these drawings, making it clear that construction was well under way with the attic design still not determined.

The attic feature would have contributed a vertical emphasis to the Bank's skyline. It is essentially a pasticcio of Soanean elements elongated for a desired verticality. The lowest stage has a shouldered rectangular plan with fluted piers at each corner below incised, inverted and squared Ionic capitals; the block-like top girdled by four pediments. The middle stage has as its source the pendentive dome on four piers of the Soane monument (see SM 63/7/32 and SM 63/7/33, in the Soane Monument catalogue). The strigilated, cylindrical upper stage, perhaps resembling a lidded cinerary urn, appears to have had its finial trimmed in both sheets.

Level

Drawing

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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).