Hart was born in Ireland and spent part of his childhood in Hong Kong. He studied architecture at Bath and Cambridge Universities, where he was taught by Michael Brawne, Patrick Hodgkinson, Peter Smithson and Dalibor Vesely. He worked first as an architectural assistant to Colin St John Wilson on the British Library project in London, before studying for a doctorate in Cambridge on Inigo Jones under Joseph Rykwert.
Publications
Hart's concerns lie in particular with the symbolic function of architecture, and with the 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 of the treatises of Sebastiano Serlio, and he has also translated the two guidebooks to Rome published by Andrea Palladio and the guidebook to Venice by Francesco Sansovino. These works 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 through their translation of the treatise by Leon Battista Alberti. In addition, Hart's monographs include influential studies of the work of Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, 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 2005.
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 an exhibition entitled 'Palladio's Rome' held at the British School at Rome, and in 2009 he co-organised 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 in 2005, and as a Visiting Scholar at St John's College, Oxford in the same year. In 2009 he was Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art 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 2011–16 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 2012-17. He served as the Assistant Honorary Secretary and Trustee of the Oriental Ceramic Society between 2014-19.
