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1st scheme for the house, c1777, unexecuted

Signed and dated

  • c1777
    datable to c1777

Notes

Adam’s extant drawings for six different schemes for alterations to The Oaks were unexecuted. According to Rowan, however, the various designs comprise an important part of Adam’s development as an architect. The use of corner towers and a large drum tower on the garden front are features which he reused at Dalquharran Castle, Culzean Castle, Findlater Castle and Castle Semple. It is worthy of note, however, that only the towers, crenellations, stepped gables and slit windows in these designs allude to a castle style, while much of the remaining elevation remains classical. Rowan has aptly described this ‘as if the house were meant to be some neo-Roman fortalice’.

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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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Contents of 1st scheme for the house, c1777, unexecuted