Vaughan Hart is an architectural historian, and Professor Emeritus of Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the
University of Bath
(Virgil, Georgics II)
, mottoeng = Learn the culture proper to each after its kind
, established = 1886 (Merchant Venturers Technical College) 1960 (Bristol College of Science and Technology) 1966 (Bath University of Technology) 1971 (univ ...
. He served as head of department between 2008 and 2010.
Biography
Hart was born in Ireland in 1960 and spent part of his childhood in Hong Kong. He studied architecture at Bath and
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
Universities (Trinity Hall), where he was taught by Michael Brawne, Patrick Hodgkinson, Peter Smithson, Ted Happold and Dalibor Vesely. Smithson was his final year undergraduate tutor, and part of Hart's student project was exhibited in the 1986 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition where it won the Royal Academy Student Prize. He worked first as an architectural assistant to Sir Colin St John Wilson on the British Library project in London, before moving to Cambridge to teach and study for a doctorate on
Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones (; 15 July 1573 – 21 June 1652) was the first significant architect in England and Wales in the early modern period, and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings.
As the most notable archit ...
under
Joseph Rykwert
Joseph Rykwert Order of the British Empire, CBE (born 1926) is Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He has spent m ...
. Hart's thesis formed the basis for his first book, on the art and architecture of the Stuart Court, published by Routledge in 1994.
Publications
Hart's concerns lie in particular with the symbolic function of architecture, and with the sources and meaning of architectural forms. He has published widely in the field of architectural history, specialising in the Italian architectural treatises and in British architectural history of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He is the co-translator (with
Peter Hicks) of the treatises of
Sebastiano Serlio
Sebastiano Serlio (6 September 1475 – c. 1554) was an Italian Mannerist architect, who was part of the Italian team building the Palace of Fontainebleau. Serlio helped canonize the classical orders of architecture in his influential treat ...
, funded by the Getty Grants Programme and
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts is a 501(c)3 non-profit that “fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realize ...
, and he has also translated the two guidebooks to Rome published by
Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio ( ; ; 30 November 1508 – 19 August 1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect active in the Venetian Republic. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily Vitruvius, is widely considered to be one of th ...
and the guidebook to Venice by
Francesco Sansovino
Francesco Tatti da Sansovino (1521–1586) was a versatile Italian scholar, humanist (one of the most important of his century) and man of letters, also known as a publisher.
Biography
Francesco Sansovino was born in Rome, the son of the sc ...
(2017). These works were all published by Yale University Press, and have in turn been translated into Chinese and Japanese. Hart's translation of these classic works formed part of a wider project initiated by Rykwert and
Robert Tavernor
Robert Tavernor (born 1954) is an English Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and founding director of the Tavernor Consultancy in London. He is an architecture hist ...
through their translation of the treatise by
Leon Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti (; 14 February 1404 – 25 April 1472) was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer; he epitomised the nature of those identified now as polymaths. H ...
. In addition, Hart's monographs include influential studies of the work of
Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones (; 15 July 1573 – 21 June 1652) was the first significant architect in England and Wales in the early modern period, and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings.
As the most notable archit ...
, Sir
Christopher Wren
Sir Christopher Wren PRS FRS (; – ) was one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history, as well as an anatomist, astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist. He was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches ...
, Sir
John Vanbrugh
Sir John Vanbrugh (; 24 January 1664 (baptised) – 26 March 1726) was an English architect, dramatist and herald, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restora ...
and
Nicholas Hawksmoor
Nicholas Hawksmoor (probably 1661 – 25 March 1736) was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principa ...
, all published by Yale University Press for
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
The latter monograph was awarded the Best Book on British Art Prize of the American College Art Association in 2004.
Exhibitions
In 1997 Hart was the curator of an exhibition entitled 'Paper Palaces: Architectural books from 1472 to 1800 in the collection of Cambridge University Library'. This consisted of architectural prints, manuscripts and over 140 rare books and incunabula, and was held in the Adeane Gallery of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It was opened by the Duke of Gloucester. In 2008 he co-organised (with Peter Hicks and Alan Day) an exhibition entitled 'Palladio's Rome' held at the British School at Rome, and in 2009 he co-organised (again with Hicks and Day) an exhibition of research work held at the Réfectoire des Cordeliers at the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Tavernor, Hart has pioneered the use of the computer to visualise lost buildings and investigate historic forms. In 2002 he was funded by the AHRC to build a computer model of Hawksmoor's work in the city of Oxford. His computer work has been displayed in the 1993 and 1995 Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, in the National Theatre Museum at Covent Garden, the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and in the ‘Nelson and Napoleon’ exhibition held at the National Maritime Museum, London, in July 2005.
Teaching and Fellowships
Vaughan Hart has lectured in many schools of architecture throughout the world, and his graduate students hold academic and museum posts in Australia, Sweden and the UK. Hart has held visiting posts as a senior fellow of the
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is a scholarly centre in London devoted to supporting original research into the history of British Art. It was founded in 1970 and endowed by a gift from Paul Mellon. Since 1996, it has been si ...
in 2005, and as a visiting scholar at
St John's College, Oxford
St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. Founded as a men's college in 1555, it has been coeducational since 1979.Communication from Michael Riordan, college archivist Its founder, Sir Thomas White, intended to pro ...
in the same year. In 2009 he was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...
in Washington, D.C. He was a visiting professor at Kent University. He served on the AHRC Peer Review College from 2011 to 2016. He was a trustee of the Holburne Museum in Bath from 2011 to 2016 and a member of the advisory board of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, an independent research institute within the University of Helsinki, Finland, from 2012 to 2017. He served as the assistant honorary secretary and trustee of the
Oriental Ceramic Society between 2014 and 2019.
Publications (selection)
* ''Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts'' (Routledge, 1994; eBook 2002; paperback edition 2014)
* ''St Paul's Cathedral: Christopher Wren'' (Phaidon, 1995; hardback edition 1999)
* ''Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture'' (with Peter Hicks, Yale University Press, 2 vols.: vol.1, 1996 (paperback edition 2005; Chinese edition, China Architecture and Building Press, 2014) and vol.2, 2001 (Chinese edition, China Architecture and Building Press, 2019))
* ''Paper Palaces: the Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise'' (with Peter Hicks, Yale University Press, 1998)
* ''Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders'' (Yale University Press, 2002: awarded the Best Book on British Art Prize of the American College Art Association in 2003; paperback edition 2007)
* ''Palladio's Rome'' (with Peter Hicks, Yale University Press, 2006; paperback edition, 2009; Japanese edition, Hakusuisha Co. Ltd., 2011)
* ''Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone'' (Yale University Press, 2008: shortlisted in 2008 by the Authors’ Club for the Banister Fletcher Book Prize)
* ''Inigo Jones: the Architect of Kings'' (Yale University Press, 2011: shortlisted in 2012 for the William M. B. Berger Prize for British Art History, the British Art Book Prize and Apollo Magazine's Book of the Year; shortlisted in 2013 for the Best Book on British Art by the Historians of British Art)
* ''Sansovino's Venice'' (with Peter Hicks, Yale University Press, 2017)
* 'Navel Gazing. On Albrecht Dürer's Adam and Eve (1504)', ''The International Journal of Arts Theory and History'', 2016, vol.12.1 pp. 1–10
* ''Myth and Modernism: Essays on the Quest for Spiritual Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century'' (Kindle Direct Publishing, 2019)
* ''Christopher Wren: In Search of Eastern Antiquity'' (Yale University Press, 2020)
*
* Photographs of Hawksmoor's buildings taken by Hart are held in the Conway Library of art and architecture,
The Courtauld.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hart, Vaughan
British architecture writers
Alumni of the University of Bath
Academics of the University of Bath
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)