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As an architectural consultant for various building commissions, Wren provided expert testimony on
the status of city buildings before and after the Great Fire of London. He took great pride in his
scientific judgements of the condition of the medieval buildings, and throughout the reports is an
historical and structural appreciation of Gothic building techniques. Gothic was the ancient style of
England, and Wren's attention to the current state of medieval churches was urged by a scientific
study of their structure, as from a nationalist interest in historical building. "Architecture has its
political Use," according to Wren; and the restoration of older buildings is a duty of a just regime.
Given a choice, however, Wren would argue for a classical building, even when that means masking
a gothic structure in antique garb, as at the new St. Paul's. In its overt expression of mathematical
proportion and references to ancient Roman culture, classicism was the favored style of the modern
age.
Wren's approach to architecture as science was not new in England. In 1570 John Dee had included
architecture in his taxonomy of disciplines that relied on experimental knowledge such as the
precepts of Euclidean geometry. In Renaissance England architecture rose through the ranks of the
disciplines through its association with science, mathematics, and perspective, and Christopher
Wren continued this course by aligning architecture as a science rooted in ancient knowledge and
practical experience.
In her extended essay on Wren's method of design, Lydia Soo emphasizes Wren's role in the Royal
Society as a key to understanding his architectural writings and practice. Yet given the nature of
architecture as a discipline of geometry, statics, and optics -- and Wren's expertise in these fields -the connections should be more obvious than they are. For Soo also notes that Wren was willing to
deviate or mask the structure if it would be more visually pleasing. The gothic vaults of St. Paul's
were famously hid behind a classical parapet, and Tom Tower in Oxford and gothic London city
churches suggest a self-consciousness about style that has yet to be explained. Part of this confusion
in Wren's work must rest with a too modern notion of scientific knowledge in this period, on the cusp
of great change yet still ensconced in the vital traditions of antique studies and precedent. Writings
by Wren's colleagues in the Royal Society should be read for their comments on experimental
philosophy and the natural worl d. For example, Robert Hooke's
Micrographia (1665) offers further insights into the study of architecture's material and visual
pleasures, and should be included in any future study of Wren's place in the world of architectural
science.