Robert Smythson
Robert Smythson is one of the geniuses of English architecture. As a mason architect, many of whose drawings survive, he was largely responsible for some of the most original, exciting, and romantic of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses, including Longleat, Wollaton, Hardwick, and Burton Agnes. With their huge areas of glass, their towers, bay windows, dramatic skylines, and, in many cases, equally dramatic hilltop sites, such houses were unlike anything else in Europe and form a fascinating and completely original chapter in the history of English architecture.