BIOGRAPHY
×STYLE
×Christopher Wren was not originally an architect. In fact, in that period it was usual that mathematicians and scientists also did works that today are specifically for architects, and this is seen in Galileo's work "Two New Sciences" where the first science is not dynamics but the strength of materials. His earliest architectural work is a family chapel in Pembroke College (Cambridge) and he was commissioned by his uncle for his ideology and style. He realised Oxford's New Theatre for which the public criticized him for his architectural flaws, due to his refusal to bend the knee to authorities. In Paris he was influenced by Italian Renaissance's style and by Bernini. After that he completed his greatest architectural work, the St. Paul's Cathedral, in the context of the reconstruction after the Great Fire of London.
St. Paul Cathedral
×St Paul's Cathedral it's considered the masterpiece of Cristopher Wren. It's one of the two anglican cathedrals in London and the second biggest religious building in the UK. Built between 1675 and 1711 on the ashes of the old St Paul's after the Great Fire, in this period Wren made thousands of drawings for the realisation of the building divided in two phases by historians. In the first phase, up to 1685, Wren planned the Cathedral with equal-length nave and choir arms and single-storey aisle walls. Soon after the accession of James II in 1685, when the Cathedral’s fundings were increased, he enlarged the west end and added upper aisle walls (known as ‘screen walls’) to create an all-round two-storey elevation beneath a more richly modelled dome, wider and higher than the one he had designed at the start of work. The ‘Revised design’ of 1685-1687 (as it is now known) was partly inspired by what Wren then knew, from drawings and engravings, of Jules Hardouin-Mansart’s domed church of Les Invalides in Paris. Between about 1690 and 1695, Wren progressively revised the cathedral to give the drum a 32-column peristyle and a sloping inner wall; and in about 1702, when the construction was halfway up the peristyle, he added a concealed brick cone to support a tall stone lantern above a timber and lead-clad outer dome. Finally, in 1703–1704, he revised the lanterns of the western towers to give them a more Baroque form, in contrast with the plainer treatment he had adopted for the outer dome, the covering of which was finished in 1710. During World War II, the church miraculously resisted from German bombing of 1940. After the war, restoration work of the cathedral was started in 1996 and finished in 2011.
Scientifc Career
×Receiving his Master of Arts in 1653, Wren was elected fellow of All Souls College in Oxford, where he started an active period of research and experiment, ending with his appointment as Gresham professor of astronomy in Gresham College in 1657. In the following year, with the death of Oliver Cromwell causing political disorder, the college was occupied by the military, and Wren returned to Oxford, where he probably remained during the events that led to the restoration of Charles II in 1660. He returned to Gresham College, where scholarly activity resumed and an intellectual circle proposed a society “for the promotion of Physical-Mathematical Experimental Learning”. After obtaining the patronage of the restored monarchy, this group became the Royal Society, Wren being one of the most active participants and the author of the preamble to its charter. In 1661 Wren was elected Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford for his exact measurement work of arc of cycloid and in 1669 he was appointed surveyor of works to Charles II. In these years he spent most of his time for mechanical, astronomical and hydraulic projects until his resignation from Oxford’s chair in 1673.