Christopher Wren

Christopher Wren was born on October 20, 1632, in the Wiltshire village of East Knoyle, where his father, also named Christopher, was rector ^[1]. The family had strong royalist and high church connections: the elder Wren soon became Dean of Windsor, and the boy's uncle Matthew Wren was Bishop of Ely, a position that later cost him eighteen years in the Tower of London during the political upheavals of the mid-century ^[2].

Wren was a delicate child but an obviously gifted one. He was educated partly at home, possibly attended Westminster School for a period, and showed an early appetite for mathematics and mechanical invention, building instruments and models while still a boy ^[1]. The civil wars of the 1640s stripped his family of position and income, an experience that left him cautious about politics for the rest of his life.

In 1650 he entered Wadham College, Oxford, taking his BA in 1651 and his MA in 1653, after which he was elected a fellow of All Souls College ^[2]. Oxford in those years sheltered a remarkable circle of experimental philosophers gathered around John Wilkins, the warden of Wadham. Within that group the young Wren dissected, calculated, observed, and built, earning a reputation that would soon outrun his years.

Anyone asking who was Christopher Wren in the 1650s would have been told about a scientist, not a builder. At twenty-four he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College in London, and in 1661 he returned to Oxford as Savilian Professor of Astronomy, one of the most respected scientific chairs in England ^[3]. His work ranged across astronomy, anatomy, optics, meteorology, and mechanics. He produced studies of Saturn, experimented with blood transfusion in animals, and worked on the mathematics of the cycloid curve ^[2].

Isaac Newton later named Wren, alongside John Wallis and Christiaan Huygens, among the leading geometers of the age, praise that carried real weight coming from the author of the Principia ^[3]. When the informal Oxford and London scientific circles were formalized as the Royal Society in 1660, Wren was a founding member; he delivered lectures at its earliest meetings and served as its president from 1680 to 1682 ^[4].

Architecture entered his life gradually. In 1663 he designed the chapel of Pembroke College, Cambridge, for his uncle the bishop, and shortly afterward the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, where he solved the problem of roofing a wide span without internal columns by adapting a timber truss scheme ^[1]. A journey to Paris in 1665 and 1666, during which he studied French classical buildings and briefly met the Italian master Gian Lorenzo Bernini, completed his informal architectural education ^[2].

In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed most of the City of London, consuming more than 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches along with the medieval cathedral of St Paul's ^[5]. Within days Wren presented King Charles II with a plan for rebuilding the city on a rational grid of avenues and piazzas. The scheme was never adopted, largely because property owners insisted on rebuilding along the old street lines, but it marked Wren as the obvious leader of the reconstruction ^[1].

He was appointed one of the commissioners for rebuilding, and in 1669 he became Surveyor of the King's Works, the crown's chief architect, an office he held until 1718 ^[2]. From this position he directed the rebuilding of 51 (some counts say 52) City churches, a body of work astonishing in its variety. No two steeples were alike; St Mary-le-Bow, St Bride's Fleet Street, and St Stephen Walbrook remain celebrated examples of his invention within tight budgets and awkward medieval sites ^[5].

The centerpiece was St Paul's Cathedral. Wren's first designs, including the Greek cross scheme recorded in the Great Model of 1673, were rejected by clergy who wanted a conventional long nave. The compromise Warrant Design of 1675 received royal approval with a clause permitting ornamental changes, a loophole Wren used to transform the building as construction advanced ^[1]. The result, crowned by a triple-shell dome rising 365 feet above the pavement, was declared complete by Parliament in 1711, making Wren one of the very few cathedral architects to see his building finished within his lifetime ^[5].

Any honest list of Christopher Wren achievements has to extend well beyond St Paul's. As royal surveyor he designed or oversaw work at nearly every major crown site of the period. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich, founded in 1675 for the improvement of navigation, was his design, and its Octagon Room still stands on the hill above the Thames ^[4]. He built the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, completed in the 1690s and widely regarded as one of the most serene classical interiors in England ^[3].

For the veterans of the army he designed the Royal Hospital Chelsea, begun in 1682, and he later planned the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, a grand baroque composition on the riverfront that was carried forward after him by Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh ^[2]. At Hampton Court Palace he rebuilt the south and east ranges for William III and Mary II in the 1690s, and he remodeled parts of Kensington Palace for the same monarchs ^[1].

Wren also trained and employed a generation of talent. Hawksmoor entered his office as a young clerk and became a major architect in his own right, while the carver Grinling Gibbons and the master builder Thomas Strong executed much of the finest work at St Paul's ^[5]. Through the Office of Works, Wren effectively created the model of the professional English architectural practice, coordinating surveyors, craftsmen, and accounts on a scale no Englishman had managed before.

Wren married twice, and both marriages ended in early bereavement. In 1669 he wed Faith Coghill of Bletchingdon, who died of smallpox in 1675, leaving him two sons; the elder, Gilbert, died in infancy, while the younger, Christopher, survived to adulthood ^[2]. In 1677 he married Jane Fitzwilliam, who bore a daughter, Jane, and a son, William, before dying in 1680. Wren never married again, remaining a widower for more than four decades ^[1].

His surviving son Christopher became his father's assistant and biographer of sorts, compiling the family memoir published in 1750 as Parentalia, still a primary source for Wren's life ^[6]. The younger Christopher also laid the last stone of the lantern atop St Paul's dome in 1708, a gesture the aging architect reportedly watched from below.

Contemporaries described Wren as small in stature, modest in manner, and unusually free of the vanity common among men of his standing. He was knighted in 1673 and sat briefly in Parliament on more than one occasion, though politics never held his interest the way geometry and building did ^[2].

The final decades brought both honor and frustration. Payment of half his salary for the St Paul's work was withheld under a 1697 Act of Parliament as a spur to completion, and Wren had to petition for the arrears after the cathedral was finished ^[1]. Tastes were also shifting. A younger generation influenced by strict Palladian ideas began to criticize his baroque manner, and court intrigue steadily eroded his authority at the Office of Works.

In 1718, at the age of eighty-five, he was dismissed from the surveyorship in favor of William Benson, an inferior architect with better political connections. Wren accepted the blow with characteristic calm and retired to a house at Hampton Court, keeping a lodging in St James's Street in London ^[2].

He died in London on March 8, 1723, at the age of ninety, reportedly after catching a chill. He was buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral beneath a plain slab. The Latin inscription placed nearby, composed within the family, ends with the phrase Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice: reader, if you seek his monument, look around you ^[5].

Few builders have marked a single city so deeply. St Paul's dominated the London skyline for two and a half centuries, survived the bombing of 1940 as a national symbol, and remains among the most visited buildings in Britain ^[5]. Dozens of his City churches still stand, some rebuilt after wartime damage, and their steeples defined the visual character of London long after the Victorians crowded around them.

Wren's influence traveled far beyond England. His churches supplied patterns for Anglican parish building throughout the American colonies, and the college he is associated with at William and Mary in Virginia bears his name, though his personal involvement in its design is uncertain ^[3]. In science, his early work fed directly into the mathematical culture from which Newton's mechanics emerged, and the Royal Society he helped found remains the world's oldest continuously existing national scientific academy ^[4].

The basic Christopher Wren facts, a ninety-year life spanning the reigns of Charles I through George I, more than fifty churches, a cathedral, two royal hospitals, an observatory, and a founding role in modern science, explain why every serious Christopher Wren biography treats him as two careers fused into one. He turned from measuring the heavens to shaping the city, and did both at the highest level his century allowed ^[1].