RR 2008/316 The Architectural Drawings of Sir Christopher Wren at All Souls College, Oxford: A Complete Catalogue

摘要

Having spent most of my adult life in Greenwich, I have grown up surrounded by Wren. His pupil Hawksmoor designed the parish church, and just up the hill are some attractive buildings designed by Sir John Vanbrugh (like Wren, not actually trained as an architect but a dramatist - imagine a combination of Alan Ayckbourn and Lord Rogers), but Wren himself dominates central Greenwich and the City of London beyond it. The thing I most admire about Wren is the rare combination of beauty and functionality. His complex and attractive buildings clearly worked. Staircases lead from where you are to where you want to be. Windows shed light just where you want to see. When gales are howling around the "exciting new urban developments" on Greenwich Peninsula, Trinity College and University of Greenwich students can take comfort in sheltered courtyards and covered porticos leading them from one place of study to another. Compare this with the architect sent to extend the Institute of Psychiatry library. He presumably spent five years or so at university studying architecture, but faced with the problem of extending a dreary concrete cube still could not manage to put in a workable fire exit or find a way for me to get to the psychology building without getting wet.