I’ll confess that I was completely unfamiliar with John Vanbrugh going into Charles Saumarez Smith’s (ep. 201) new biography but I was quickly taken with this 18th century figure. Beginning his career as a playwright before moving into architecture, Charles writes both of his personal life and professional activities, attempting to make connections between Vanbrugh’s written word and architectural projects. Considered a favorite architect by postmodernists like Venturi and Scott Brown, Robert Adam, and John Soane, if there’s a lesson for today’s designers it’s that it is not bad for a building to be bold.
Interested in learning more, I caught up with Charles to hear more about his own interest in Vanbrugh and dig into the big ideas in his new book.
Let’s start with the big question: who was John Vanbrugh?
John Vanbrugh is best known as the architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace — two of the biggest, grandest and most palatial country houses in Britain, much used in films. Castle Howard was used as the setting for Brideshead Revisited, the well-known TV documentary starring Jeremy Irons. He also designed two other huge houses which were on the same scale: Claremont, which was replaced by a smaller house after the death of its owner, the Duke of Newcastle and Eastbury in Dorset of which only part of the stable block survives. And there are also two houses which are less well known: Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire, an incredibly well-preserved house with a powerful façade by Vanbrugh and Seaton Delaval in Northumberland, which is the free-est and most adventurous of Vanbrugh’s houses in the way it is designed. It is pretty astonishing to think that he only started out as an architect when he designed Castle Howard in 1699, aged 35, and died in 1726, so was only working as an architect for just over twenty five years.
Also, more than any other architect I can think of, the rest of his life was interesting. He started out as a wine merchant, then travelled out to India working for the East India Company, came back to London and joined the army. He left the army, travelled to Holland to help the invasion by William of Orange and was imprisoned for four years in Calais and then the Bastille suspected of being a spy. Back in London, he wrote two plays, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife which are funny, clever and were extremely successful in the way they explore attitudes towards libertinism and marriage. He was a member of the Kit-Cat Club, was made a herald, and travelled out to Hanover as part of a government delegation. He both designed and for a short period ran the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket which is where all of Handel’s early operas were first performed.
It’s obvious that his architecture benefitted from the fact that he was unbelievably good at sweet-talking clients into undertaking adventurous architectural projects and that he was also good at sketching out his ideas, something which hasn’t previously been recognised. He must also have been funny and good company, as demonstrated by his letters which are a big part of my book, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, published in the US on March 3rd.
