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Purpose
Notes
The rooms on this are not labelled on the plan, but it has been suggested by various scholars that the round rooms were intended as libraries and/or record offices. The central colonnaded round room is reminiscent of Adam's design for the rotunda within the Edinburgh Register House, which was designed at around the same time. The large central rectangular hall was intended for ceremonial purposes and dinners, and the pre-existing seventeenth-century chapel is identifiable within the right-hand cross range from the footprint of its undercroft. In the nearside of Lincoln's Inn Fields we can see that Adam intended to convert the gardens into a piazza.
Adam's scheme for Lincoln's Inn was not executed, and instead, Sir Robert Taylor's designs were built in 1774-80. See scheme notes.
Level
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).