[2] Preliminary design for the principal front, c1772-79

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Robert and James Adam office drawings
- Public buildings
  - Register House, Princes Street, Edinburgh: executed, including unexecuted designs for a terrace on Leith Street, a Deputy Ranger’s House, and a guard house, 1772-92 (28)
    - Alternative designs for the building, c1772-79, executed with alterations (13)

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Reference number

SM Adam volume 10/68

Purpose

[2] Preliminary design for the principal front, c1772-79

Aspect

Rough elevation of a two-storey, ten-bay building, with three projecting bays, rusticated on the ground storey, and with relieving arches over the central door and flanking windows, and with the first storey articulated by pilasters, and containing a central sculpture-filled niche, flanked by balustraded, pedimented windows, with a frieze of festoons, and an attic ornamented with rectangular tablets, and to the right-hand side of these projecting bays are three balustraded bays, and to the left is a single-bay link, and a three-bay wing, with a central window flanked by niches on the ground storey, and a Venetian window within a relieving arch, and flanked by narrow rectangular windows on the first storey, and this wing is surmounted by balustrading, and a single-storey, domed cupola

Scale

not to scale

Signed and dated

1772-79
datable to c1772-79

Medium and dimensions

Pencil on sugar paper (437 x 282)

Hand

Robert Adam

Literature

For a full list of literature references see scheme notes.

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).