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Purpose

Finished drawing showing an elevation of the principal front for the building, c1765-68, unexecuted (1)

Notes

Of this design for the elevation of the building Alistair Rowan wrote the following: ‘There is an antique gravitas about this solemn yet sumptuous façade orchestrated by no less than ten gigantic Corinthian columns, arranged as a semi-circular peristyle at the centre of the façade. The pedimented flanking blocks adopt a vocabulary that Adam had acquired in Rome: heavy tabernacle frames on bracketed plinths, long panels of relief sculpture and rectangular upper windows copied from Michelangelo’s St Peter’s. A final Roman motif is provided by the semi-circular domes on the side elevations.’

The Adam brothers’ designs for the Bath Assembly Rooms were not executed. See scheme notes.

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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 Finished drawing showing an elevation of the principal front for the building, c1765-68, unexecuted (1)