[1] Design for a hothouse, plan, sections, elevation, August 1792

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Country houses, etc.
  - Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire: alterations to house and estate buildings for Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke, 1790-1794; presentation drawing 1800; surveys 1818 (70)
    - Estate buildings, 1792-1794 (42)
      - Designs for a hothouse, 1792 (5)

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Reference number

SM 8/3/27

Purpose

[1] Design for a hothouse, plan, sections, elevation, August 1792

Aspect

Plan of the Hothouse; cross section; Section through the tall wall of [the] Hothouse; Elevation of front of Hothouse

Scale

bar scale of 1/9 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

as above, The Earl of Hardwicke, Passage (four times), Brick on edge (four times), Tan Pit (twice), Glass Partition, 110 feet, fix'd Sash, door / 3.0, door, Tan pit, level of Passage A, dimensions given, (pencil) A Copy of this Drawing / M^rSoane took to the Duke / of Leeds - making the whole / Extent - 100 feet - Aug 11 179(?)1 / feet / 100

Signed and dated

August 1792
Great Scotland Yard / Aug^t1792

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, pen and pink, grey, yellow and black washes on laid paper (489 x 380)

Hand

Attributed to Frederick Meyer (1775), draughtsman
attributed to Frederick Meyer (1775-?, pupil 1791-1796)

Watermark

IV and fleur-de-lis

Notes

This design for a hothouse shows Soane's use of contemporary innovations in gardening technology. The hothouse has two rooms divided by a glass partition and covered in glazed roofs and one wall of glass. A hollow brick wall surrounds the rooms and is full of hot air. The rooms each house a large planting bed made of brick. The beds, called 'tar pits', are to be full of oak bark and planted with pineapples. The fermenting bark would heat the plants, thus providing a warm environment for the growth of tropical plants.

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).