structural:scholar_edition
Architectural career

Wren was a prominent man of science at the height of the Scientific Revolution. The Scientific Revolution seemed to promise a merger of the science of mechanics and the art of building. In Galileo Galilei 's Two New Sciences the first science is not dynamics, for which the book is now better known, but rather the strength of materials, which Galileo had recognized 30 years earlier as a "science that is very necessary in making machines and buildings of all kinds." In 1624 Henry Wotton, the British ambassador to Venice, published a book on architecture in which he analyzed in a rudimentary way the structure of a stone arch. Moreover, in the 17th century, it was people who would now be called scientists who were awarded the commissions to design and build monumental structures. In Turin, Guarino Guarini, a mathematician, devised the plans for such celebrated buildings as the Royal Church of Saint Lawrence, the Chapel of the Holy Shroud and the Palazzo Carignano. In Paris, Claude Perrault, a physician and an anatomist, designed the façade of the Louvre and the observatory of the Académie Française. In London, it was Wren and Hooke who collaborated as chief architect and city surveyor after the city was devastated by the Great Fire of 1666.

In 1661, just months after taking his post at Oxford, Wren was invited by Charles II to oversee the construction of new harbour defences at Tangier—then-newly under British control. Wren ultimately excused himself from the King's offer. Letters dated to the end of 1661 note that in addition to the Tangier project, Charles II had also sought Wren for consultation regarding repairs to Old St Paul's Cathedral, the reconstruction of which would ultimately be the architect's magnum opus. Speaking of Wren's vocational transition from academic to architect-engineer, biographer Adrian Tinniswood writes "the use of mathematicians in military fortification was not unusual... Perhaps Wren also had experience of the business of fortification, more than we know."