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Purpose

Preliminary designs, designs and a finished drawing showing a longitudinal section through the building, c1765-68, unexecuted (7)

Notes

Two of the preliminary designs for the ballroom and concert hall (Adam volumes 1/1 and 1/3) have previously been alternatively attributed by Alan Tait as being for unexecuted assembly rooms in Edinburgh, and therefore dating from the Adam brothers’ Scottish office before they went on their Grand Tours. It is argued here, however, that the density of Roman motifs within the schemes were both informed and influenced by the Adam brothers’ Grand Tours. Moreover, the similarity between these drawings and the Adams' others for the rooms (Adam volumes 21/61, 27/54, 27/51 and 28/48) is too striking to be ignored.

It must be noted that one of these drawings (Adam volume 1/3) is inscribed in pencil with Sketch of a Project for Edinr, but the hand of this inscription is not known, and may have been added later and/or misinscribed.

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 Preliminary designs, designs and a finished drawing showing a longitudinal section through the building, c1765-68, unexecuted (7)