![]() It is telling that the one major residential com mission that did land on Wren’s desk – for a new house at Easton Neston in Northamptonshire for William Fermor, 1st Baron Leominster – was delegated to his pupil Hawksmoor. It involved the occasional consulta tion for the City of London (another institution) and its Livery Companies, rare one-off projects such as the Drury Lane Theatre and a handful of small-scale domestic designs. Yet it was resolutely institutional rather than private in any way. Wren’s work for the universities of Oxford and Cam bridge fell outside of the purview of these offices and was facilitated by his friendships with college heads and divines. Photo: Grant Smith/View Pictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images St Paul’s Cathedral, London, rebuilt to designs by Christopher Wren in 1675–1710. Duties to the former occupied him on-and-off for nearly half a century and resulted in his most famous building, the rebuilt cathedral. He was also Surveyor to the Fabrics of the two principal Anglican buildings of London: St Paul’s (from 1669) and Westminster Abbey (from 1698). This was based in the same space as the Office of Works and involved many of the s ame personnel, but it was administratively distinct. It was in this capacity that Wren over saw and administered all royal building work including the major new extension to Hampton Court Palace and the two royal hospitals at Chelsea and Greenwich.Īlongside his royal duties, he headed another office, responsible for the designing and building of the City Churches after the Great Fire. He was appointed to this role in 1669 and he held it until 1718. ![]() The most important was that of Surveyor of His Majesty’s Works, based in the Office of Works in Scotland Yard, Whitehall. Wren held four official positions over the course of his career: one for the Crown and three for the Church. ![]() This is reflected in his architectural out- put: very few buildings designed by Wren were not for one of these four clients. To be sure, his was a life of near-constant service to institutions: the Crown, the Church and, to a lesser extent, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Looking back then, Wren saw his life as one defined principally by ‘Service’. Reflecting on his 50-year career, he told the Lords that he had ‘worn out (by God’s Mercy) a long life in Royal Service’, adding that it was because of this service that he had ultimately ‘made some figure in the world’. In April 1719, towards the end of his long life, Wren wrote a letter to his former paymasters, the Lords of the Treasury. ![]() One letter, in particular, sums up how Wren saw his personal and archi tectural achievements. We can glimpse something of the man from his cor respondence, of which Anthony Geraghty and I are currently preparing a scholarly edition. Yet Wren’s contemporaries also write affectionately of his warmth as a friend, his honour and, above all, his trustworthiness.Ĭhristopher Wren (c. His own letters and his appearances in contemporary diaries sug gest detachment to the point of cold-bloodedness – this is certainly the Wren depicted by Peter Ackroyd in his novel Hawksmoor (1985). If Wren’s approach to architecture is hard to pin down, his personality remains even more mysterious. Recently, he has been cast by Vaughan Hart as the purveyor of architectural wisdom from the ancient Near East, Byzantium, and the Ottomans – an architect of almost radical eclecticism. For Lisa Jardine in her biography of 2002, Wren was a political agent, a Tory Royalist on a mission to obscure the memory of the Interregnum behind walls of white Portland stone. There’s also Wren the theoretician, his library full of copies of Vitruvius. To others, he is the bridesmaid of the English baroque: the designer of monumental palaces and royal hospitals that, though impressive, don’t go quite as far in terms of sheer invention as the buildings of his pupils Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh. ![]() Some have seen him as a great scientist-architect – an English equivalent of Claude Perrault – who realised the triple dome of St Paul’s Cathedral with its cubic-parabolic core. Yet he remains an enigmatic figure, whose legacy con tinues to be contested by architectural historians. Preview and subscribe here.Ĭhristopher Wren, who died 300 years ago this month, is England’s most famous architect – the only one whose face has graced a banknote. ![]()
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