M&D related: Christopher Wren Biography

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy all,

I've run across some wonderful background for Mason & Dixon, to wit:

On A Grander Scale, the Outstanding Life of Sir Christopher Wren
by Lisa Jardine.

There is much of interest in it on the intersection between
science, commerce, religion, architecture, the military, and politics
in England at the fall of Charles I, Cromwell's Protectorate, and
through the restoration period, ie the reigns of Charles II, James II,
William &
Mary, and Queen Anne. Wren stood at the intellectual center of the
brand new Royal Society, and provided the social glue that held its
several antagonistic personalities together. Newton figures in the tale
along with Hooke, the first Astronomer Royal, longitude and "Lunars",
the financier Stephen Fox, and the risible "Order of the Garter". I was
astounded to learn that Wren, the architect, was what we would call the
CFO of the Hudson Bay Company, and that on his deathbed he regretted
having once turned down the opportunity to invest in and oversee a
crown project (that had failed due to mismanagement) to build a
grandiose port facility on the coast of Africa, presumably for the
slave trade? 

Jardine is limited if not actually misleading in her treatment of
Wren's architecture itself, so I'd recommend
The Architecture of Wren, by Kerry Downes
as a chaser.

Good books on Wren's antecessor in the post of *Surveyor of the King's
Works* and of his professional proteges are:
Inigo Jones, by John Summerson
Hawksmoor's London Churches, by Pierre de la Ruffiniere Du Prey
Hwksmoor, by Kerry Downes
The Work of John Vanbrugh, by Geoffrey Beard

Chow Y'all,
Mark

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