Christopher Wren was born in 1632 in a Wiltshire village to a royalist clergyman who became Dean of Windsor, and he grew up a sickly child as the English Civil War turned against his family’s side. At Oxford he joined the Invisible College, the circle of Robert Boyle and John Wilkins that later became the Royal Society. He invented a tipping bucket rain gauge, ground telescope lenses, studied Saturn’s rings, built lunar models and transparent beehives, and used a quill and animal bladder to inject wine and opium into a live dog’s veins. As an astronomy professor with a gift for mathematics, he was asked to design Pembroke College chapel and the Sheldonian Theatre, whose timber trusses spanned the hall without pillars but whose exterior drew criticism.

His only trip abroad, to Paris in 1665, exposed him to French Baroque and a glimpse of Bernini’s drawings. Weeks after his plans to repair old St. Paul’s were accepted, the Great Fire of September 1666 destroyed over 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches. Charles II rejected his grid plan for London but gave him 51 churches to rebuild. The clergy rejected his Greek cross Great Model as too Catholic, so Wren submitted the modest Warrant Design, then used a clause allowing ornamental changes to build a giant dome behind scaffolding over a 36 year campaign. Parliament withheld half his salary, and commissioners forced a balustrade on him. He lived to 90 and is buried in the crypt under a plaque reading “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

• The triple dome: an inner ceiling, a lead covered timber outer shell, and a hidden brick cone carrying the stone lantern
• Wren’s argument that Gothic came from Islamic, or Saracenic, architecture rather than the Goths
• Why he admired the parabola-like pointed arch but considered flying buttresses structurally dishonest crutches
• His love letter to Faith, returning her repaired watch and calling its ticking the pulse of his heart
• The Royal Hospital Chelsea, Greenwich Naval Hospital, and his old age visits to sit beneath the dome