(This article is adapted from a research essay I wrote at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.)
Sir Christopher Wren casts the longest shadow of all English architects, still reaching into our own times, the 25th of February 2023 marks 300 years since his death. It can sometimes feel like everything built after him is in some way a response to or repudiation of his astonishing legacy of construction. From the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, through a diverse set of city churches, military hospitals and college libraries, and on to his undoubted masterwork, St Paul’s Cathedral, Wren’s architectural career was as varied as the styles in which he worked. His habit of dancing between Palladianism, pure classical revival, ornamented Baroque, and even the Gothic vernacular, has left many students of his architecture desperate for a unifying factor, something that can collect each work into a comprehensible retrospective. Instead of adding to the flutter of articles and essays exploring Wren’s buildings that will mark this anniversary, I’m going to explore the fragmentary and limited texts that Wren left behind which may give us a clearer idea of the great man’s own personal explanation of his career.
As Kerry Downes observed, “Wren and his school…was one of doing in architecture, not of writing” and so it comes as no surprise that, despite the wealth of surviving buildings and detailed drawings, we are left with hardly any textual justification for them. The little we have was bought together after Wren’s death by his son, Christopher Wren Jr., and codified into a work entitled Parentalia, which was in turn published in 1750 by his son, Stephen. Parentalia contains a mixed bag of texts ranging from letters to notes annotating passages of Palladio’s treatise on architecture, however, the most enlightening sections are known as the ‘Tracts’. There are four of these, taking the form of extended notes on the fundamentals of architecture, the later ones have their focus on the history of building and the study of the classical style but it is in Tract I where Wren’s ideas are most neatly synthesised and thus will form the centre of my discussion, with passing reference to Tract II in which, through his discussion on the origins of the classical orders, he expounds some additional precepts that can be seen as enlightening on his architectural thinking.
At this juncture, we must, however, consider for a moment the authenticity of these Tracts and where they sit within Wren’s career. “Each one is undated, fragmentary, and carries inherent problems concerning not only interpretation but also authenticity and editorial interference” writes J.A. Bennet in his analysis, and it is true that, in the case of Tract I, the original manuscript is missing and thus its lines are only known via Parentailia, only published two generations later.
Therefore a certain pinch of salt is required when looking at these texts, and although the general consensus is that they are likely to be very close to Wren’s words, we can never be sure of their full veracity. There is also the intention behind the publication of Parentalia to consider, as Wren himself never published these texts in his own lifetime, it would be entirely possible for the son and grandson to have ‘tidied up’ their ancestor’s thoughts in order to present a more total and convincing posthumous view of him. But as it is, and for the purposes of our exploration, we must take them as being of Wren senior’s hand, as, even if heavily doctored, they have proved central to the study of Wren’s architecture since their publication and do illuminate his works further.
Tract I can be split into two parts, initially, Wren discusses the social force of architecture and its role in politics, and then he moves on to elaborate a theory of beauty and explores its application in architectural form. It is this second part which has captivated generations of architectural historians and comes the closest to a universal philosophy behind Wren’s work.
“Architecture has its political uses; Publick buildings being the ornament of a country, it establishes a Nation. Draws people and commerce; makes the People love their native country, which passion is the original of all great actions in a common-wealth.”
This is how Wren opens his first tract, outlining the importance of architecture for the nation as a whole and the particular significance of public buildings, even going as far to suggest that great architecture can inspire ‘great actions’ amongst the population. This is not a new idea, architecture as a force for social improvement had begun to flourish in the republics of the Italian Renaissance a few centuries earlier, but it was relatively fresh to England, and, especially with the opportunities granted by the Great Fire in 1666, civic remodelling was at last an option for the medieval rabbit warrant of old London. Wren’s society-improving intentions can be seen in his unrealised plan for the rebuilding of the Square Mile. The wide boulevards and avenues, the geometrically perfect circuses and the prominent locations of important public buildings are a world away from the shambles of pre-fire London. Being the very heart of the country, drawing people and commerce was a primary function and here Wren has designed a stage set in front of which ‘great actions’, occasions of state, and enlightened, patriotic people could perform.
Wren’s political architecture can be seen to great effect at Greenwich, his work on the complex now known as the Old Royal Naval College is a prime example of him ornamenting the country. Originally intended as a royal palace, the scheme got caught up in politics and transformed, under successive monarchs, into a hospital for elderly seamen, but Wren kept the palatial form, the enormous scale, domes and colonnades, and Portland stone, as, though no longer literally a royal residence, being part of the national ornament it reflected back on the political power and wealth of the nation and the monarchy all the same.
“Beauty, Firmness, and Convenience, are the Principles.”
Here Wren boils down his views on architecture to three simple, if somewhat ambiguous, Principles. Once again, we must look at the buildings in order to elucidate the ideas. Firmness can be seen as a reference to the structured order and weight of the classical style and could be taken as an explanation of why Wren’s buildings seldom possess the same busy baroque frothiness of the work of Mansart and others in France and Italy, or indeed his English successors like Vanbrugh. Convenience is somewhat harder to explain, this could refer to ideas of decorum, that the building ought to reflect in its physicality the purpose and function of the building. This is most visible in Wren’s work at the Royal Hospital Chelsea where the restrained ornament and Doric order testify to the noble and militaristic foundations of the project. It could, however, also refer to literal, practical convenience, take for example the covered, collonaded walkways at Greenwich that allowed the inhabitants of the hospital to walk from wing to wing sheltered from the rain, or the east end of the church of St Lawrence Jewry, thickened at one end to make it convenient to both the original angled line of the medieval street on the outside as well as the aesthetic need for a squared east end in the interior. Similar assorted tricks and tweaks at many of the other city churches allow them to conveniently slot onto the sites of the old medieval ones they replaced.
Beauty is the most ambiguous of the three and, as opposed to the other principles, Wren then spends some time laying out his own personal explanation and theory of beauty. Therefore, I too must quote the passage which every book, article, or essay on Wren, from 1750 to the modern day, has included with clockwork regularity:
“There are natural causes of Beauty. Beauty is a Harmony of Objects, begetting Pleasure by the Eye. There are two Causes of Beauty, natural and customary. Natural is from Geometry, consisting of Uniformity (that is Equality) and Proportion. Customary Beauty is begotten by the use of our Senses to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes, as Familiarity or particular Inclination breeds a love to Things not in themselves lovely. Here lies the great Occasion of Errors; here is tried the Architect’s Judgement; but always the true Test is natural or geometrical Beauty.”
Wren lays out two different by complimentary paths to beauty, the former being by way of a ‘Harmony of Objects’ achieved through geometry (we should not forget that Wren was a mathematician by training), this is similar to Italian renaissance ideas inspired by, amongst others, Palladio. However, in the second path he breaks with the tradition of the Renaissance, as Lynda Soo writes, “Wren postulated a relativistic definition of beauty based on perception and custom that challenged the renaissance concept of absolute beauty.” Customary beauty, as Wren terms it, appears to sit in the subjective, emotional world rather than the mathematical rationality of ‘natural beauty’ – as Bennet observes, it puts the viewer at the centre of the process of achieving beauty, rather than the architect or the building itself. The idea that something that is objectively not ‘lovely’ may still be loved is an unusual one for a scientist and child of the Enlightenment to set out, although he does so not without warning, stating that in this murky world of the customary there ‘lies the great occasion of errors’ and he swiftly returns to the ‘true test’ that is, of course, geometry.
This opens up a fascinating dialectic in Wren’s thinking. Fuerst wrote in the 1950s that Wren’s beauty theory “reveals a latitudinarianism capable of embracing two entirely different, contradictory and mutually exclusive canons of art.” However, the suggestion that these are contradictory theories is a troubling one, as Wren clearly intended for them to sit side-by-side on the page, and by extension in his buildings. The trap into which Fuerst may have fallen is to conflate these ‘causes’ of beauty with empirical definitions of beauty as a concept. As Bennet points out, Wren in fact offers no definition of beauty, rather only those things which can be used to trigger or reveal it.
Where and how can we see this clearly important passage of text manifested in Wren’s buildings? Bennet argued that “Wren’s buildings are analysed in terms of the conflicting claims of the labels ‘Classical’ and ‘Baroque’, and the conclusion generally reached is that his style is not accommodated by either with complete satisfaction.” One cannot deny that, whilst with a foot in each camp, Wren’s buildings are too reasoned and proportional to be wholly baroque and possess enough variation and creative intensity to be more than simply classical. Bennet suggests this is connected to another inherent dualism, the one found in Wren’s beauty theory – “since Wren includes these two criteria within his theory, we have a theoretical source for his compromise in architectural practice.”
This compromise, between natural and customary beauty, can also be seen in the instances when, normally dictated to by client or existing structures, Wren embraces the Gothic. The Tom Tower at Christchurch, Oxford, St Mary Aldermary in The City, and, most distinctively, in the plan of St Paul’s. In the latter we can see the union of ‘natural beauty’ in the proportioned dome, geometric porticoes and classical aedicules, with the ‘customary beauty’ found in the familiarity of the Latin cross layout inherited from the pre-fire gothic cathedral.
Although the Tracts go on to cover at length the history and use of various architectural forms, it is the three main tenets of Tract I that we have been exploring that are the crux of Wren’s architectural writing. Namely, the political and societal impact of public architecture, the guiding principles of beauty, firmness, and convenience, and thirdly the theory as to the causes of beauty. Whilst we have noted where these individually manifest in Wren’s architecture, let us now see how these can be applied together to one of his masterpieces. The Wren library at Trinity College, Cambridge was designed in 1679 and eventually completed in 1695 and stands as a perfect example of Wren’s skill as an architect. Firstly, let us consider the political and public statements the building may be making. It is certainly a display of wealth and prestige for the college, outperforming the existing buildings in its quad both in ornament and height, standing as a centrepiece of the college’s complex. In the competitive college culture of Cambridge, this is certainly a political statement. In a societal context, we could also see this as Wren using architecture to sing the praises of learning and education, giving an academic library a facade on the quad side not dissimilar to some royal palaces of the period, Bernini’s work on the Louvre albeit on a smaller scale.
In terms of the three principles, let us put beauty to one side for now and deal with firmness and convenience. The regimented and orderly engaged columns on the quad façade ground the building along with the heavy, centrally dividing architrave. The form of the building, a regular, rectangular hall, again suggests stability and when coupled with the austere and weighty river façade with its Doric order and reduced fenestration there is an overall impression of timeless firmness that Wren desired. When it comes to convenience at Trinity, we really see Wren’s talent for invention come to the fore. The requirement for a library is, of course, to have enough space to store all the books in its collection whilst also allowing in enough natural light by which to study, Wren’s solution here is to allow the façade to belie the interior as he places the floor level of the first story not, where one would expect, in line with the architrave on the façade but rather to match the springs of the arches on the ground floor arcade, filling in the tympanum but otherwise leaving no indication visible externally. By this technique he allows ample, uninterrupted wall space for book storage whilst, what appear from outside to be the first-story windows, act as a kind of large clerestory, bathing the library in an enormous amount of natural light. Wren has maintained the order of his façade whilst also creating an internal space perfectly suited to its function.
Now to the theory on beauty, what can that tell us about Trinity Library? By using classical, geometric forms, the correct orders of columns and balanced proportions of construction it can certainly be said that Wren is trying to evoke his ‘natural’ cause of beauty. The ‘customary’ may manifest in the way his building is able to sit comfortably between the existing, ‘familiar’ wings of the quad (the lowering of the first story floor also allowed Wren to maintain the same floor level between the old and new buildings), or possibly his design of the interior library space may be said to appeal to the customary by creating a space that is recognisable and familiar as a library with all its usual facets. This seamless blending of formal and familiar is fundamental to Wren’s best designs, as Downes writes, geometry was “not an absolute starting point on which to base a design but rather an empirical aim to be achieved through the realisation of the design” allowing Wren the freedom to marry convenience, custom, and the natural beauty of geometry.
The application of Wren’s writings to his buildings, as I have just attempted, invites the question, does Wren’s writing tell us more about his architecture than his architecture can tell us about his writings? In other words, what is more effective, using Wren’s Tracts to gain a greater understanding of his buildings, or using his buildings to help us in understanding the Tracts? Soo has suggested that “the enormous impact of these published treaties … indicates that in architecture the writings of theory could have a significance equal to the making of the buildings” and there is no doubt that more attention has been paid to Wren’s theories than some of his lesser-known buildings. However, we must consider that Wren never intended these Tracts for publication and so it is likely that he wished his architecture to speak entirely for itself. There also lies the question of when the Tracts were written, whilst it is thought they were likely written towards the end of his career, Bennet asks: “were they only the idle scribblings of an old man, whose intellectual vigour and architectural career were past, or do they represent a considered, working philosophy?” It is likely we will never know.
It is left to the individual to decide for themselves how useful they see Wren’s writings in the study of his architecture. Personally, whilst I find them a fascinating window into the mind of a man who came to define a generation of English intellectuals across both art and science, and an intriguing step in getting a little closer to understanding the man who was responsible for some of Britain’s greatest buildings, I think his architecture is best serviced when taken in isolation from these sometimes ambiguous texts. Then, once the architecture has been allowed to speak for itself, it can be co-opted to allow us a greater understanding of Wren’s writing, rather than the other way around. I believe that one can only truly get an understanding of the ambiguities and nuances in Wren’s Tracts if one is already familiar with the variety of his stately, beautiful, inventive, and inspired architecture. The buildings reflect on the text rather than the text on the buildings.
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Morgan Haigh 