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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.
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).
Contents of Adam volume 28
- Capriccio for a vast symmetrical building showing an elevation composed as a five-storey centre block with seven-bay entrance on steps, with three-bay wings and domed pavilion linked on either side by a triumphal arch and screen to three pavilions with towers, in front of a vast exedra terminated in towers.
- London: Parliament House (designs for). Design for a large building composed as a main block with a portico, with quadriga of three-bay coupled columns with sculpture in niches on either side of the door, a cupola on drum above and three pantheon domes, all linked by a seven-bay colonnade to domed and bowed pavilions at either end.
- London: Parliament House (designs for). Unfinished design for a large building composed around a circular hall with octagonal entrance chamber and portico with coupled columns, and with a court on either side with bowed pavilions, behind which are irregular buildings.