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  • image SM 51/3/4

Reference number

SM 51/3/4

Purpose

Design for the river front, 24 June 1825

Aspect

Elevation of the river front of the new committee rooms

Scale

bar scale of 1/10 inch to 1 foot

Inscribed

Design for New Committee Rooms &c - House of Lords and (pencil) 11/9, 18/, 10/9

Signed and dated

  • 24 June 1825
    1825 and (pencil) 24/6/25

Medium and dimensions

Pencil, yellow ochre and black washes, shaded, pricked for transfer on thin wove paper (332 x 554)

Hand

Joseph Michael Gandy ARA (1771 - 1843)

Notes

This design for the river front of the new committee rooms is in a Gothic style with battlements, buttresses and square-headed mullion-and-transom windows with trefoil heads. It has seven bays and three storeys, and measures approximately 80 feet across. The Gothic style was chosen to match Wyatt's Speaker's House (S. Sawyer, Soane at Westminster, PhD thesis, Columbia University, p. 736). To the right of the drawing in pencil the heights of the three floors are given (11'9'', 18', 10'9''). Also in pencil are a rough design for an arch linking the committee rooms to the house of Black Rod and, on the elevation, designs for an additional buttress between the first and second bays (surely to be replicated between the sixth and seventh bays) and a design to turn the central window on the ground floor into an entrance.

Level

Drawing

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

If you have any further information about this object, please contact us: drawings@soane.org.uk

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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