“There stands today, in the Soane Museum, his collection of George Dance’s drawings. It is sometimes observed that it looks very like a sarcophagus. It is also very like a shrine”.Soane: The Man and the Style, by John Summerson.

The Tomb of the Unknown Draughtsman provides a shrine for the unfinished, the unsung and the forgotten. It is an archive of the overlooked that also marks the passing of traditional drawing skills that have been lost with the advent of the computer.

The tomb is an architect’s plan chest that takes the form of a ziggurat – an archetypal element of funereal architecture. There are six steps to the ziggurat, each of which contains an open drawer. The drawers are half-pulled out in pinwheel fashion so that they form a spiral in plan. Each draw is labelled with a word that collectively spells out the title of the piece.

On the plan chest is arranged the detritus of everyday office life: a bottle of Tipp-Ex, a scale-rule, a roll of Magic Tape, a set-square, a can of spray-mount, some glue and a roll of detail paper. On the top of the plan chest is an incomplete foam-board model of a ziggurat structure. The sides of the chest are decorated with an inscribed key depicting redundant drawing instruments.

The plan chest will be carved from six different varieties of stone laid one on top of the other, a petrified moment in an ordinary architect’s life. A section appears to have broken off so that the archive can also be perceived as a ruin.

Placed next to the chest is an ashtray that contains the ash of the unknown draughtsman. The chest sits on a mirrored base so that the ziggurat is reflected and appears to float in space with nothing above or below.

The Tomb of the Unknown Draughtsman

1 Sketch2 North Elevation3 East Elevation4 South Elevation5 West Elevation6 Elevation detail

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