Academic study for the plan for a public building with a double convex portico on steps that opens through rectangular and circular halls to a central space divided into three parts by columns, with two square campanile with round corners on either side. Beneath the plan are two sections through a domed apse, with coffering and oculus above niches and screen.

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Robert and James Adam travel drawings
- Adam Volume 9

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Reference number

Adam vol.9/34

Purpose

Academic study for the plan for a public building with a double convex portico on steps that opens through rectangular and circular halls to a central space divided into three parts by columns, with two square campanile with round corners on either side. Beneath the plan are two sections through a domed apse, with coffering and oculus above niches and screen.

Aspect

Plan and sections

Inscribed

Inscribed in ink on drawing 34

Signed and dated

Undated, probably 1756 - 57.

Medium and dimensions

Pen, grey wash242 x 171

Hand

Robert Adam

Watermark

horned crown

Notes

The two campanile in this plan, one showing variations, suggests the building may be some form of longitudinal church, although it lacks any obvious altar space and has a variety of entrances. The use of columned screens to link one space with another also appears in the plan in Adam vol.9/14, again a possible church. The two sections are probably taken through the circular entrance hall. This pen and wash drawing does not appear to have been set out preliminarily in pen or chalk and is comparable with Adam vol.9/24. The blurred ink technique is also found in Adam vol.9/40. John Fleming dates the drawing 1756/7 (see Fleming, op.cit., caption to pl.66).

Literature

Rep. J. Fleming, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh & Rome, London, 1962, pl.66.

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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