Ocean State Libraries

The Palladian style dominated British architecture for most of the 1700s, until the rise of the Adam style, which held sway for the final decades of the eighteenth century. Brothers Robert and James Adam were almost single-handedly responsible for infusing Georgian architecture with the sensibilities and elements of classical Hellenic and Latinate design. Their elegant, sophisticated form of Neoclassicism affected not only architecture, but also interior...

"This book attempts to explain how the great eighteenth-century architect Robert Adam went about the business of design. It therefore deals with Adam's drawings rather than the buildings themselves, and tries to show that these pen, wash and watercolour 'inventions', of which he was an acknowledged master, were the ideal vehicle for his architectural ideas. It was to this end that Robert and his brother James studied drawing and composition in the...