Professor Vaughan Hart

BSc BArch MPhil PhD

Profile

Vaughan Hart is a Professor of Architecture.  He is also the Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture (CASA).

He studied Architecture at both Bath and Cambridge Universities (Trinity Hall) and worked as an architectural assistant to Colin St John Wilson on the British Library project in London before studying for a doctorate in Cambridge under Joseph Rykwert.

Vaughan’s research has focused on the Italian architectural treatises and British architectural history of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Research

Vaughan's research interests lie with the symbolic function of architecture and with the meaning of architectural forms.

He is the co-translator (with Peter Hicks) of the treatises of Sebastiano Serlio, and he has also translated the two guidebooks to Rome published by Andrea Palladio.

His monographs include influential studies of the work of architects such as Inigo Jones and Sir John Vanbrugh and, in 2005, Vaughan was awarded the Best Book on British Art Prize of the American College Art Association for his study of Nicholas Hawksmoor. 

In 1997 Vaughan was the curator of an exhibition entitled 'Paper Palaces: Architectural books from 1472 to 1800 in the collection of Cambridge University Library'. This was comprised of architectural prints, manuscripts and over 140 rare books and incunabula, and was held in the Adeane Gallery of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

In 2008 he co-organised (with Hicks and Alan Day) the exhibition '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 held at the Réfectoire des Cordeliers at the Sorbonne, Paris.

Vaughan has pioneered the use of the computer to visualise lost buildings and investigate historic forms. His 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 at the National Maritime Museum, London, in 2005.

Vaughan has held visiting posts as a Senior Fellow of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2005, and as a Visiting Scholar at St John's College, Oxford in the same year. In 2009 he was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

He is currently a visiting Professor at Kent University and is a Member of the advisory board of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, an independent research institute within the University of Helsinki, Finland, 2012-15.

Teaching

• History and Theory (BSc Architecture, Years 2 and 3)
• Research papers

Publications