Almost a month back in Dubai and I’ve made a lot of progress on the Bank of England model. But I’m still falling behind in terms of recording my work here. It’s been such a mammoth effort to model the Bank and I find myself wanting to “push on a bit further” rather than breaking off to write up a post. Then before you know it, the weekend is over.
This is a sequel to the “Backward Compatible Columns” post.
The windows mentioned in that post belong to the Court Room Suite, and can be attributed to Sir Robert Taylor, Soane’s predecessor. They probably took their cue from work by George Sampson, the original architect for the Bank. He built a double courtyard block on a deep site with a narrow frontage, hemmed in on both sides.
Sampson put a large Palladian window in the west wall of his Pay Hall, opening onto the greenery of the churchyard beyond. Later on, when Taylor expanded the Bank to the West, he demolished the church, but he wasn’t allowed to dig up the graveyard. Instead,…