"Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) was by turns businessman, soldier, playwright, herald and architect of some of the most important country houses of his era. in this handsome and engaging book architectural historian Vaughan Hart draws on these diverse interests to examine afresh Vanbrugh's surviving, destroyed and unrealised buildings as well as the designs he executed in collaboration with Nicholas Hawksmoor. It was the fate of Vanbrugh's buildings to be at first maligned and then misunderstood. Hart outlines the contemporary political and social events which influenced the architect and shows how his strikingly original houses, such as those at Seaton Delaval and Grimsthorpe, can be interpreted through reference to classical mythology, renaissance fortifications and medieval houses." "In explaining why Vanbrugh's buildings look the way they do, Hart allows his novel architectural forms to be understood for the first time as expressions of the visual and psychological theories of his friend and fellow Whig Joseph Addison."--Jacket.