Vaughan Hart
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vaughan Hart is an architectural historian,[1][2] and Professor Emeritus of Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath.[3] He was head of department between 2008 and 2010.[4]
Hart was born in Ireland in 1960 and spent part of his childhood, from 1966 to 1969, in Hong Kong.[citation needed] His father worked for GCHQ and his mother was a teacher.[citation needed] He studied architecture at the University of Bath and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was taught by Michael Brawne, Patrick Hodgkinson, Peter Smithson, Ted Happold and Dalibor Vesely. Smithson was his final year undergraduate tutor, and he graduated from Bath with a first class B.Arch degree. Two works by Hart were exhibited in the 1986 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition;[5] he won the Bovis/AJ drawing prize.[6] Between 1985 and 1986 he worked as an architectural assistant to Sir Colin St John Wilson on the British Library project in London, and one of his drawings of the entrance hall is now in the RIBA drawing's collection at the V&A in London.[citation needed] Hart then moved to Cambridge to teach in Wilson's unit and study for an M.Phil and then a doctorate on Inigo Jones under Joseph Rykwert.[7] Hart's thesis formed the basis for his first book, on the art and architecture of the Stuart Court, published by Routledge in 1994.[8]
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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, funded by the Getty Grants Programme and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and he has also translated the two guidebooks to Rome published by Andrea Palladio and the guidebook to Venice by Francesco Sansovino (2017).[9][10][11] These works were published by Yale University Press, and have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.[12] Hart's translation of these classic works formed part of a wider project initiated by Rykwert and Robert Tavernor through their translation of the treatise by Leon Battista Alberti.[13] In addition, Hart's monographs include studies of the work of Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor,[14][15][16] all published by Yale University Press for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.[17] In 2004, the latter monograph was awarded the Best Book on British Art Prize by the Historians of British Art,[18] an affiliate society of the American College Art Association. In 2023, Hart contributed to a London Review of Books podcast, hosted by Rosemary Hill, on the seventeenth century perception of Stonehenge.[19]
Exhibitions
In 1997 Hart was the curator of an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum entitled 'Paper Palaces: Architectural books from 1472 to 1800 in the collection of Cambridge University Library'.[20] In 2008 he co-organised (with Peter Hicks and Alan Day) an exhibition entitled 'Palladio's Rome' held at the British School at Rome,[21] 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.[22] Along with Tavernor, Hart has pioneered the use of the computer to visualise lost buildings and investigate historic forms.[23] In 2002 he was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to build a computer model of Hawksmoor's work in the city of Oxford.[24] His computer work has been displayed in the 1993 and 1995 Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions,[25][26] in the National Theatre Museum at Covent Garden,[citation needed] the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 2008,[27] and in the ‘Nelson and Napoleon’ exhibition held at the National Maritime Museum, London, in July 2005 (the model of Napoleon’s coronation is available on YouTube).[28]
