WREN, SIR CHRISTOPHER (1632-1723), architect and geometer, Surveyor of the Rebuilding of London, builder of Paul's, and the man upon whom the Commonwealth's claim to the first rank in the arts of design most securely rests. He was born at East Knoyle in Wiltshire, the son of a clergyman of the old establishment — a descent from the losing side of the century's great argument (see OLD EPISCOPAL MEN, THE) which the Commonwealth agreed very early to forget, and which the man himself never once invited it to remember. From Westminster school he went up to Wadham College at Oxford, then the meeting-room of the natural philosophers whom the wars had gathered there, and was of that company while still an undergraduate; fellow of All Souls at one-and-twenty; Gresham professor of astronomy at five-and-twenty, with a paper upon the ring of Saturn already to his name. Out of the Gresham meetings came, in the first winter of the Settlement, the Philosophical Society of London (q.v.), of which he was a founder at eight-and-twenty and President from 1680 to 1682; the Frame and the Society are of one year's birth, and the coincidence has done duty in a hundred Commonwealth Day sermons since.
Geometry was his trade before building was his art, and he came to the second as to a problem in the first. His earliest considerable structure, the University Theatre at Oxford, built between 1664 and 1669 for the University's public acts and at the University's own charge — the older manner of prelatical benefaction having ended with the prelates — is roofed upon a system of trusses that asks no pillar of the floor beneath it, to the lasting instruction of the building trade. He passed the plague months of 1665 at Paris, where Bernini allowed him some few minutes' sight of the designs for the Louvre; he said afterwards that he would have purchased a longer sight at any price the Italian had cared to name, and the remark deserves preserving as the last recorded occasion on which he is known to have envied any man anything.
He was in London for the Fire (see FIRE OF LONDON, THE GREAT), and within ten days of the last smoke had laid before the Council of State a plan for rebuilding the City upon straight streets and open quays. The Council judged, no doubt rightly, that a city of freeholds could not be redrawn like a proposition, and the plan was laid aside; laid aside, it should be recorded, and not lost, for it will be met with again in this article on the far side of an ocean. The Act for the Rebuilding of the City (1667) created for him the office of Surveyor of the Rebuilding, and for the next five-and-thirty years the City was his drawing-board: brick and stone by statute where timber had huddled, the principal streets widened, and the burnt parishes rebuilt in the manner that is described, with their steeples, under ARCHITECTURE (q.v.).
Paul's has its own head (see PAUL'S, THE GREAT CHURCH OF); what belongs to the biography is the scale of the commitment. Old Paul's, the cathedral church of the prelates' age, had burned to its crypt; what Wren raised upon the ashes, from the first stone of 1675 to the last of 1710, was a preaching-house at the dimensions of the basilicas — a dome lifted not above a throne nor above a tomb but above a congregation, and carried upon a cone of brick between its inner and outer shells, a device that is pure geometry doing the work of masonry. The choir was opened for worship in 1697, and the Senate marked the year by making the architect knight, the Commonwealth's plainest honour rendered for its plainest reason; the whole was finished in 1710, and the builder, then in his seventy-eighth year, walked under his own dome to hear Purcell's (q.v.) musick at the opening. The dome is less in span than St Peter's; the present writer is not the officer to adjudicate the remainder of that comparison, and contents himself with recording that the comparison is now made, at Rome as at London, in both directions. Paul's is the republic's argument in stone: dimensions that answer the Continent, and a plainness that answers the Continent's argument.
The rest of the tale is the civic breadth no architect of any court has ever been permitted. He built the library of Trinity College at Cambridge, the handsomest room a book has yet been given in this island; the Seamen's Hospital at Greenwich, begun in 1696 upon the site of the old royal house by the river, where the Commonwealth lodges the broken servants of its fleet with a dignity no palace ever contrived for a courtier; and when the Senate resolved upon a Western seat, it was to the Surveyor's office that the drawing of the plan was committed, so that the streets of Oceana (q.v.) keep to this day the geometry London had refused, and the Convention House (q.v.) rose from designs furnished under his hand in his sixty-fifth year. He served no court and held no office of works, there being neither in the Commonwealth to hold; the Continental critic has observed that he built no palace, and the observation is just, and its answer is the list above. His commissions were the congregation, the college, the city, and the fleet, and it has not appeared, in two centuries, that the arts of design were the poorer for the exchange.
He died at London in the February of 1723, in his ninety-first year, and was carried by order of the Senate to the crypt of his own church, the first of its worthies; four years later the crypt received Purcell, and the builder and the musician of the republic's self-consecration have lain since under the same pavement. Upon the stone are the name and the years, and nothing besides; the Commonwealth has never considered that the omission required supplying. (R. Q.)