​Wren is Always Worth More Consideration

Wren is Always Worth More Consideration:  Book Review
                   Ian Ellingham, PhD, FRAIC

Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge

    On a grander scale:  The outstanding life of Sir Christopher Wren, by Jardine, Lisa.  HarperCollins, 2002, 600 pages

     His invention so fertile:  A life of Christopher Wren;  by Tinniswood, Adrian.  Jonathan Cape, 2001, 463 pages

Surely there is something special about any architect who, three hundred years after his death, warrants an ongoing succession of new books.  Historians still seem able to find new insights into the life and works of Christopher Wren.  Remarkably, the end of the last century also saw:  Wren by Margaret Whinney (Thames & Hudson, 1998, 216 pages) and Wren's 'Tracts' on Architecture and Other Writings, by Lydia M. Soo (Cambridge University Press, 1998, 236 pages).  

Why do we remain interested in his life and accomplishments, and how can Wren’s buildings and writings be picked over endlessly?  Part of Wren’s outstanding and fertile life is that he was productive over a very long-period of time (he died aged 91), and worked at a time before the various disciplines had identified themselves and erected barriers, so was able to comfortably engage in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, business, politics, and (inevitably) longitude, and integrate the various intellectual stimuli.  Wren probably felt most at home with respect to medicine:  certainly, near the end of his life he reflected on his long career and wondered whether it would have been better for him to have worked more at medicine, rather than wasting time dealing with what he termed ‘rubbish’, that is to say, architecture.  His work definitively overturned the theories of medicine which had been inherited from the Greeks and Romans, through what we would see as rather gruesome experiments, one of which Tinniswood uses to introduce his book; effective anesthesia appeared a century after Wren’s era.  Wren was fully engaged in the debates of the time, and experimented, wrote and lectured in them.  What was nature of Saturn?  (Galileo observed the rings but didn’t know what they were - Wren built models to explain them.)  Why exactly do people need air?  What is air?  What did it do?  What were comets?  What is an ideal urban form?  Scientists of the time, faced a complex maze of questions. 

While both books deal with Wren as more than an architect, Jardine pushes this further than Tinniswood, so this particular reviewer/builder was more engaged by His invention so fertile.  However, both of these substantial books place intellectual architecture as only one of a vast array of then-emerging disciplines, as a new wave of thought swept through western civilisation, supported by observational and experimental techniques. 

Wren attempted to understand architecture, especially its relationship with the classical principles of architecture.  He tried to explore the mechanisms that drove perceptions of beauty, but, perhaps lacking the complex theoretical, experimental, mathematical and computational techniques required to deal with human belief systems, his work in structural systems is more satisfying. 

To the builder, the most tantalising work of Wren is contained in what remains of what Tinniswood terms his “systematic discourse on architecture, covering the origins of beauty, the history of building from the earliest times, and the principals of statics and structure...”  These works were never finished, and much has been lost, but one can still perceive the work of the 17th century scientist striving towards some sort of understanding through classification and the challenging of established beliefs.  Indeed, in the second tract, Wren began to explore the psychological and symbolic aspects of architecture, issues which still pose puzzles to today’s builders.

One might wonder if the stumbling, tangled, political and sometimes macabre explorations of the 17th century discussed in these books, might have potentially led to some alternative architecture - a road not taken.  Were the frustrations of dealing with architecture as a science (perhaps like medicine) that drove Wren, late in life, to wonder if he had wasted too much time dealing with buildings?

Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich

To the architectural practitioner, these formidable books are undoubtedly more to be browsed than linearly read in their totality.  Yet, both authors manage to draw the reader into them - so even an attempt to riffle through them could lead to hours of intriguing reading. 

It also becomes clear why books on Wren will continue to be written.  He lived in a fascinating time, when much of what we take for granted was being formulated.  Wren’s immense range of activities demand interpretation within the context of our own changing attitudes.  Moreover, unlike most architects, Wren wrote - and his son kept and organised his material.  While both books conclude with the inevitable reference "lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice", and Tinniswood suggests that Wren monuments are manifested everywhere in the built environment, Jardine proposes that Wren (and his son) created a paper monument just as enduring. 

***  The inscription on Wren’s rather plain tomb in the crypt of St.Paul’s Cathedral:  ‘Reader, if you seek a  monument, look about.’

St.Paul's Cathedral, London

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The original version of this article was  published in OAA Perspectives, Autumn 2004.  Since that time, additional books have been published and reprinted, exploring Wren's ideas and buildings including: 

Building St Paul's, by Campbell, James W.P.  Thames & Hudson, 2008, 176 pages.

Wren's City of London Churches, by John Christopher.  Amberley Publishing, 2012, 96 pages.

Memoirs of the Life and Works of Sir Christopher Wren: With a Brief View of the With a Brief View of the Progress of Architecture in England, from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First to the End of the Seventeenth Century, by Elmes, James (1782–1862), Cambridge University Press, 2015, 744 pages. - reprint of 1832 biography of Wren.

Sir Christopher Wren (Classic Reprint): Scientist, Scholar and Architect,  by Weaver, Lawrence, Forgotten Books, 2018,  225 pages - reprint of 1923 book.   

Sir Christopher Wren, by Paul Rabbitts.  Shire Publications, 2019, 96 pages.

The Afterlife of Christopher Wren, 1800-2015, Walker, Matthew.  Routledge, 2024, 274 pages (to appear in 2024)

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