WREN, CHRISTOPHER (1632–1723)

WREN, CHRISTOPHER (1632–1723), English architect. Sir Christopher Wren was an English scientist and architect, important for confirming, in what later was jokingly referred to as the "Wrenaissance," a tradition of classical architecture in England in the seventeenth century that lasted for two centuries. His father was a distinguished cleric, and Wren was well educated, coming into contact while a student at Oxford with a group of scientists who were later, in 1661, to found the Royal Society. His interests at this time were science and astronomy; after receiving his degrees, he was elected a member of All Souls College and in 1661 he became the Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford.

Gradually, however, Wren became interested in architecture, then considered a part of mathematics. When in 1663 his uncle, the bishop of Ely, asked him to design a chapel at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he was able to produce an adequate design, simple and classical in its forms. A year later he began the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, a complex structure, taken as to be expected from the design of classical theaters, but roofed with a new truss system without columns, based on a floor plan devised by John Wallis, formerly professor of geometry at Oxford. It was in 1665 that Wren made his only visit abroad, to Paris, where he visited the new classical buildings and met, if briefly, the Italian architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

On his return to London, Wren began further restorations at St. Paul's Cathedral. But in 1666 came the Great Fire, and with it an opportunity for him not only to rebuild the fabric of the cathedral, but also to redesign the whole city of London on a regular and ordered plan. As one of the commissioners appointed to survey the areas destroyed, Wren was very much involved in the restoration of London; when in 1668 he was also appointed surveyor general of the king's works, he resigned from Oxford and turned all his attention to architecture. Of the project for London, which was taken from some of the new plans for Rome, little was realized, commerce and expediency requiring that everything in the city be quickly rebuilt along the existing patterns of streets. Wren was also involved in rebuilding more than fifty local city churches. Their designs, varied and distinct as they were in their plans, established a new form for the Protestant church, with open galleries inside and bell towers outside, often set apart from the basic structure and effectively recalling, in all their classical details, the spires of the older medieval churches that had earlier been present at the same sites.

Wren's design for St. Paul's Cathedral was equally important. Its great dome, with the colonnade running around the drum, taken from a design by Donato Bramante for St. Peter's, was a model for many later buildings—such as the Capitol in Washington, D.C.—where a dome was to be used for purely secular buildings. Wren also worked on several projects for King Charles II. Although many of his designs for Winchester Palace, Whitehall, and Hampton Court were never realized, at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea (begun in 1682), and at the Royal Hospital for Seamen, Greenwich (1696 onward), he defined an ideal of monumental architecture, deeply influential on architects of the next generation. In addition, Wren again worked for the universities, notably at the library of Trinity College, Cambridge (1676–1684) and at Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford (1681–1682), which, following what he called customary rather than natural beauty, was constructed in a Gothic style to complement its older architectural surroundings.

The last years of Wren's life were not happy. His supervision of the Office of Works became haphazard, and in 1718 he was dismissed, retaining only his surveyorship at St. Paul's and at Westminster Abbey. It was then that the Palladian group, led by Lord Burlington, took charge of this office, arguing for a new native style of architecture, based on the theories of Andrea Palladio and Inigo Jones, to replace the more pragmatic baroque style of Wren and his followers. But what Wren had done was of immense importance. And if his designs never reached the quality of those executed by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had begun his career in Wren's office, his ideas about his work, carefully preserved by his son, served to demonstrate, in ways now compatible with the experimental approaches he learned as a scientist, how architecture and its history could be seriously thought about and seen as part of a design tradition that dated back to Italy and antiquity.

WREN, CHRISTOPHER (1632–1723)

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