On Sept. 2, 1666, the Great Fire of London razed the city to the ground. Onlookers, such as diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706), saw the apocalyptic blaze turn night into day “for 10 miles round about.”
He wrote:
“All the skie was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven, and the light seene above 40 miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame; the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, ye shrieking of women and children … the aire all about so hot and inflam’d that at the last one was not able to approach it, so that they were forc’d to stand still and let ye flames burn on.”
Evelyn’s estimate was a little off. The fire destroyed 13,200 central city houses (the homes of 70,000 people), 87 parish churches, Guildhall, The Royal Exchange, and St. Paul’s Cathedral—erasing centuries of architecture.
Before the Great Fire, towers and church steeples dominated London’s skyline. One hundred churches stood in the city’s ”square mile” alone. The square mile (now London’s financial district) had once included the ancient Roman town of Londinium and was a rabbit warren of narrow, dusty streets packed full of wooden buildings, a tinderbox for fire.
A Monumental Task for an Amateur
King Charles II (1630–85) commissioned Christopher Wren (1632–1723) for the monumental task of surveying the damage and rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral and 51 churches.
Interestingly, in the late 17th century, all architects were amateurs for architecture wasn’t yet a profession. When Wren became an architect, he was already known across Europe as a great mathematician, astronomer, and inventor. Physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) described Wren as one of “the greatest geometers of our times.” He was one of the founders of the Royal Society, which by 1663 was known as “the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.” He’d held his position as professor of astronomy at the University of Oxford since he was 25 years old.
In 1663, Wren accepted his first architectural project at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College Chapel, commissioned by his uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren. Then, in 1664, he started building the University of Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, based on sketches of the ancient Roman D-shaped theaters described by the ancient Roman architect Virtuvius. He, however, reversed the traditional Roman interior by placing the audience on the flat wall and the chancellor’s chair on the wall at the center of the semicircle. His scientific genius allowed him to create a greatly admired 70-foot ceiling supported by an internal roof truss.
Between 1664 and 1665, Wren traveled to the continent, spending several months in Paris. This year, in his June 24 talk on “Christopher Wren: A Life in Letters” at Wadham College Oxford (University of Oxford), architectural lecturer Matthew Walker explained how Wren received his architectural education in Paris by observing the city’s architecture, especially the building of the Louvre. In the summer of 1665, he wrote from Paris:
Reinventing London’s Churches
After the fire, Wren rebuilt 51 of the 87 destroyed churches, as some church parishes merged. Most of them were rebuilt between 1670 and 1684 with the help of Wren’s friends and followers, notably architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (circa 1661–1736) and physicist Robert Hooke (1635–1703). They had to build quickly, cheaply, and often on irregular-shaped sites due to the high density of housing and other city buildings.Wren successfully created a new style of church fit for reformed Protestant church services, designing each church so that “all should hear the service and both see and hear the preacher,” according to “The Oxford Companion to Art,” edited by Harold Osborne.
Wren regarded himself as a classicist, yet his style of architecture is classified as English Baroque, which, according to “A World History of Art” by Hugh Honour and John Fleming, is “a pragmatic and somehow sparer [style] than its continental forbears.”
“Wren’s interiors are clean, beautiful rooms, with gold-and-white plaster work and large pale windows; with galleries round the walls for the extra people that lived in the city,” according to “The Observer’s Book of Architecture” by John Penoyre and Michael Ryan.
To reduce costs, Wren used ordinary bricks and roofing tiles, creating characteristically sparse exteriors that he later crowned with steeples adorned with classical motifs. In lieu of expensive gems and lavish decoration ill-afforded on such a vast rebuilding project, Wren’s steeples are the jewels of his churches. He created many steeple styles, such as small open cupolas (St. Magnus the Martyr), sharply pointed lead spires (St. Martin-Within-Ludgate), stone steeples with a ring of columns (St. Stephen Walbrook and St. James), and multistoried stone steeples (St. Bride and St. Mary-le-Bow).
In Wren’s church architecture, we can see snippets of the ancient world and that of his European counterparts, executed in a very English manner. For instance, we can see the ancient architect Vitruvius’s Roman basilica in St. Bride’s Church; Dutch architecture, such as the robust steeple and austere exterior in St. Mary-at-Hill; and an Italian-style dome in St. Mary Abchurch.
With the exception of St. Paul’s Cathedral, many experts see St. Stephen Walbrook as Wren’s finest domed church. He created a light, open room with an ingenious coffered dome finely finished in plaster.
Steel skyscrapers now soar above Wren’s church steeples. Yet ask anyone to name England’s greatest architect, and Sir Christopher Wren will always be the answer.
Three hundred years ago, Wren was laid to rest in St. Paul’s Cathedral. His epitaph reads: “Here in its foundations lies the architect of this church and city, Christopher Wren, who lived beyond ninety years, not for his own profit but for the public good. Reader, if you seek his monument—look around you. Died 25 Feb. 1723, age 91.”
_(24028481238).jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg){kind=link}
