Christopher Wren

Christopher Wren rebuilt London after the Great Fire and designed St Paul's Cathedral, having begun his career as an astronomer. Born in East Knoyle in Wiltshire in 1632, the son of a royalist clergyman, he was a precociously gifted experimentalist, studied at Oxford, and became professor of astronomy at Gresham College at twenty-five and Savilian Professor at Oxford at twenty-nine. He was a founder of the Royal Society and served as its president. His scientific work covered lunar mapping, the rings of Saturn, barometers, blood transfusion into a dog, and the mathematics of collision; Newton cited him among the leading geometers of the age. He came to architecture in his thirties as an educated amateur, which was then the normal route. He designed the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford and Pembroke College chapel at Cambridge, and travelled to Paris in 1665 to study French building and meet Bernini. The Great Fire of September 1666 destroyed some 13,200 houses and eighty-seven parish churches. Wren submitted a plan for a new city on a grid with piazzas within days; property rights made it impossible, and London was rebuilt on its medieval street pattern. He was appointed Surveyor of the King's Works in 1669 and oversaw the rebuilding of fifty-one churches, each solving a different awkward site, with steeples of great inventiveness. St Paul's occupied him from 1675 to 1710. He obtained a warrant permitting variations and then departed from the approved design entirely, building a dome of three shells — an outer timber and lead profile, an inner masonry dome, and a brick cone between them carrying the lantern. He was knighted in 1673 and died in 1723, buried beneath it.

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