[5] Preliminary design, 1790

Explore Collections

You are here: CollectionsOnline / [5] Preliminary design, 1790

Browse

Books

Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Town houses
  - London: Buckingham House, 91 Pall Mall: (executed) house for 1st Marquess of Buckingham, 1790-1793, (executed) alterations to the library, 1794, and (executed) alterations on the ground and first floors, 1813 (52)
    - Preliminary designs, 1790 (6)

Use of images and copyright
Enlarge this Image

Print this image in A4 view

Reference number

SM 33/1/3

Purpose

[5] Preliminary design, 1790

Aspect

First floor plan

Scale

to a scale of 1/9 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

The Marquiss of Buckingham, Pallmall

Signed and dated

1790

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and pink, grey and yellow washes on laid paper (361 x 525)

Hand

Soane and Soane office, and titles added later by George Bailey (Soane Museum curator, 1837-60)

Watermark

fleur-de-lis within crowned cartouche and ornate W below

Notes

This drawing shows an initial design for alterations to the houses fronting Pall Mall. The house has a seven-bay symmetrical street front. The west house is shown completely rebuilt, except for the original offices in the rear courtyard (shown in pencil on drawing 4 (SM 33/1/2)). The east building, in pink wash on the left-hand side of the sheet, is largely retained, with partitions introduced and the principal staircase removed. This drawing appears to be unbuilt designs by Robert Furze Brettingham (c.1750-1820), architect to 91 Pall Mall in 1785 and 86 (H. Colvin).

As this first floor plan reveals, the preliminary design does not do well to accomodate the difference in floor levels between the two buildings. Quarter-staircases lead from one house to the other, suggesting that the floor levels vary by a few feet.

Literature

Survey of London, vol.s XXIX and XXX, 1960, pp. 360-363; H. Colvin, Biographical dictionary of British architects 1600-1840, 4th ed., 2008

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).