Christopher Wren

Laura Porcza
XIth D grade
English bilingual nature study
British culture and civilisation
Sir Christopher Wren
 (20 October 1632 – 25 February 1723) is one
of the most highly acclaimed English architects
in history. He was responsible for
rebuilding 51 churches in the City of
London after the Great Fire in 1666, including
his masterpiece, St. Paul's
Cathedral,on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710.

Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at

the University of Oxford, Wren was a
notable astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-
physicist as well as an architect. He was a founder
of the Royal Society (president 1680–82), and his
scientific work was highly regarded by Sir Isaac
Newton and Blaise Pascal.
The year London was devastated by fire, 1666, Christopher Wren was a
thirty-four-year-old astronomy professor at Oxford -- not in architecture for
which he's famous, but in astronomy. Wren did become a major rebuilder of
that burned-out city. But, before the fire, he was one of England's leading
scientists.

Wren was also a prodigy. Even before he entered Oxford University at the
age of fourteen, he began inventing scientific instruments, and he produced
a stunning array of measuring devices. At twenty-one, Wren joined the
astronomy faculty at Oxford, and by twenty-nine he was given the Savilian
Professorship there. He brought to astronomy a brilliant talent for the use of
geometry -- so much so that Newton called him a leading geometer of the
day.
Wren's interest in architecture and city planning began shortly before the Great
Fire, and his great architectural output followed it. But it was during those years
before the Fire that Wren-the-scientist blossomed. And least known of Wren's
vast scientific contribution was his early work in medicine.

Wren was only fifteen when he began

assisting a medical professor with his
dissections. And he kept working in medicine
until the Great Fire. One of his many
accomplishments was that he may've been
first to inject medicine intravenously. What
he did was make a dog drunk by injecting
wine into its vein. That doesn't impress us
until we realize that Harvey had only recently
explained that blood circulates. The idea that
blood was the vehicle for narcotics and
nutrients was completely alien in Wren's time.
When Wren was a student at Oxford,
he became familiar with
Vitruvius's De architectura and
absorbed intuitively the fundamentals
of the architectural design there.
Within days of the fire subsiding, architects such
as Christopher Wren were offering up designs for
rebuilding. But none of these were implemented
and the reconstruction took years.
Wren's first architectural project
was the chapel of Pembroke
College in Cambridge, which
his uncle, the Bishop of Ely, asked
him to design in 1663. The second
was the design of the Sheldonian
Theatre in Oxford, completed in
1668. This, the gift of
Archbishop Sheldon to his old
university, was influenced by the
classical form of the Theatre of
Marcellus in Rome, but was a
mixture of this classical design
with a modern empirical design.
St Paul's has always been the touchstone of Wren's
reputation. His association with it spans his whole
architectural career, including the 36 years between
the start of the new building and the declaration by
parliament of its completion in 1711.
Wren had been involved in repairs of the old
cathedral since 1661. In the spring of 1666, he made
his first design for a dome for St Paul's. It was
accepted in principle on August 27, 1666. One week
later, however, the Great Fire of London reduced
two-thirds of the City to a smoking desert and old St
Paul's to a ruin.