Designs for the ground, first and attic floors, ?May 1831 (3)

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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: New State Paper Office, Duke Street, Westminster, 1829-34 (207)

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Reference number

SM (102) 82/2/5 (103) 82/2/4 (104) 82/2/3

Purpose

Designs for the ground, first and attic floors, ?May 1831 (3)

Aspect

102 Plan of the Principal Story of the New State Paper Office / in Duke Street Westminster 103 Plan of the One Pair Story of the New State Paper Office / in Duke Street Westminster 104 Plan of the Attic Story of the New State Paper Office / in Duke Street Westminster

Scale

(102-104) bar scales of 1/6 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

102 as above, labelled: The Army Arrears Office, Duke Street, M^r Farquhar, Saint James' Park, North, Entrance Hall, (pencil) Messenger, Bookbinder, Principal / Staircase, M^r Hobhouse, Ch[imne]^y (twice), M^r Lemon, Board Room 103 as above, labelled: Army Arrear Office, North, West, (pencil) Clerks Room, Ch^y(4 times), Water / Closet, Principal Staircase, Library 104 as above, labelled: Ch^y (6 times), Landing (twice), Principal Staircase, Upper part of the Library

Medium and dimensions

(102-104) Pen, pink, blue, grey and yellow washes, pricked for transfer on wove paper (513 x 527, 514 x 527, 503 x 528)

Hand

Soane office

Watermark

(102-104) Smith [& Allnutt]

Notes

Soane had originally intended for the library to be composed of 3 separate rooms but he was instructed to change this design for one long room (drawings 22, 30 and 38). Soane worried that this change increased the risk of fire damage, since a fire is much more difficult to control in a larger space. Having expressed his anxiety to Henry Hobhouse, who was apparently too preoccupied with politics to respond, the architect effected his own compromise by dividing the library into 3 separate, double-height compartments (drawings 103-104). (S. Palmer, 'Sir John Soane and the design of the new State Paper Office', Archivaria, 60, 2005, p. 55).

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).