Design for new government offices with pavilions, March 1825

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Sir John Soane office drawings: the drawings of Sir John Soane and the office of Sir John Soane
- Office of Works
  - London: Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices, Whitehall & Downing Street: designs for new offices and scheme for the improvement of Downing Street, 1823-33 (284)
    - Designs for the Board of Trade and Privy Council Offices and preliminary designs for the new Home Office, January-September 1825 (60)

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Reference number

SM (165) 50/3/4

Purpose

Design for new government offices with pavilions, March 1825

Aspect

165 Perspective View of the New Council Offices Board of Trade and Home Department from the south east

Inscribed

as above, Approved / Liverpool / F Robinson

Signed and dated

Lincolns Inn Fields March 1825

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, sepia, yellow ochre and blue washes with sepia wash border on wove paper (525 x 736)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

Smith & Allnutt 1820

Notes

Soane described the origins of the pavilions at the 1828 Inquiry:
'When the model was made, forming one unbroken line, the whole extent of the Board of Trade and the Privy Council Office, it was observed, that it would produce a monotonous effect. I did not think so; great unbroken lines occur in all the best examples of antiquity, and many of the most celebrated works in Italy have the same character, such as the Stoppani Palace [the Palazzo Vidoni Caffarelli] by Raphael, the little Farnese Palace, and many others. In order to take off from what was considered the monotonous effect of the unbroken line of entablature shown in the model, I was directed to make a projecting pavilion next Downing Street; and subsequently I was directed to make a design to continue a similar portico in the front of the Office of the Secretary of State for the Home department.'
Drawing 165 is signed as approved by Lord Liverpool and Frederick Robinson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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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.

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