300th anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren

For today’s 300th anniversary of the death of Sir Christopher Wren, I am highlighting a couple of my favourite Wren spaces, produced early in his career before the polymath had settled upon architecture as his main activity.

Wren's uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren, commissioned Wren's first building. It was a rectangular chapel for Pembroke College, Cambridge, designed in a restrained Palladian style and as such was the first classical building in either Cambridge or Oxford.

Wren's second building, the Sheldonian Theatre for university ceremonies was altogether more adventurous and was commissioned from Wren, the young mathematician and Savilian Professor of Astronomy by his colleagues at Oxford University. It is built in a filled-in D shape with two galleries and a structurally-challenging flat roof.

In building the Sheldonian Theatre, Wren was responding to very specific needs of how to accommodate a large gathering of students with perfect sight lines.?He came up with an ingenious structure that included windows all round above each gallery to maximize light.?

The Theatre’s flat roof was borrowed from the idea of an open Roman theatre with a canvas cover and inside Wren’s Sheldonian, the ceiling is painted with a trompe-l’oeil pulled-back awning revealing a grand conceit on the virtues and learning.?

The Chapel and cloister range at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was Wren's third executed building. It is a small-scale yet highly accomplished arrangement that neatly incorporates a long gallery and a clock inserted into the pediment as well as a chapel and cloister range. The successful composition of the fa?ade and the design of the open vaulted cloister, that allows a beautiful play of light, are much admired.

The success of these two buildings at Oxford and Cambridge early in his career and before the Great Fire of London of 1666, are a foretaste of the 51 new churches Wren built in the City of London, with great variety, ingenuity and beauty - and of course his masterpiece, St Paul's Cathedral.

It is at St Paul's that we most acutely experience Wren's combination of a superior understanding of mathematics with a sense of the beautiful and the sublime, witnessed in his breathtaking cantilevered staircase and perfect play of light from carefully placed clear-glass windows, enhanced by the wrought iron and carved work of the interior of St Paul's SW Tower.

And in this space Professor Lisa Jardine believes Wren, one-time Professor of Astronomy, planned to install a zenith telescope to view the cosmos.

Janet Gough 8 March 2023