Wren tour

By Temple Ligon

On October 20 Sir Christopher Wren turns 382. England’s greatest architect, Wren was born in 1632, and he died in 1723.

There was a lecture last week on the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren, as there is every year on the secondFriday in October. Starting in October 2000, the annual Wren lecture is part of the continuing series produced by the Wren Institute for Urban Research. When London burned to the ground in 1666, it was Wren who was ready to rebuild, and rebuild he did: 52 churches in all, finishing St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1710.

For the past year or so the lectures have been in the library at 2225 Terrace Way. There, at my place, we can easily accommodate 30 or so audience members, but the great advantages of a home venue are the bar and the kitchen.

In the near future, maybe in another two or three years, the Wren Institute should put together a complete tour of the 26 churches Wren designed that still stand in the City of London. It might be the world’s only tour offering that covers the work of one architect in one city for one week, speaking English the whole time.

While we’re at it, chances of touring Pembroke College at Cambridge University are pretty good. Since Cambridge isn’t all that far from London and since this was Wren’s first architectural commission, Pembroke should make the list.

Then there’s his second commission, Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. Other secular projects still standing in or near London: Greenwich Royal Observatory, Trinity College Library at Cambridge, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, Chelsea Hospital, and Greenwich Royal Hospital, later converted into the Royal Naval College.

If the student’s school teaches a course on the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren, which hardly any do right now, passing the course can work as a pre-requisite. I can argue in favor of putting together a summer school schedule in Columbia focusing the summer’s two terms on the work of Sir Christopher Wren. Again, here a pre-requisite can be met. After absorbing nothing but Wren for an entire summer, the next summer can start with the complete Wren church tour.

There will be plenty of art history majors, history majors, and, of course,  architecture students, all who could make good use of the pre-travel courses and the travel itself. But the basic premise of the courses and the travel is to get engineering students, pre-med majors, and MBA candidates to sign up for a course in the fine arts, specifically the visual arts, combinations not ordinarily seen on most campuses. Students who would never consider a course on architectural history might pick up on this idea and learn something more about the world and come out of it speaking the language of architecture.

There is no age preference, just as long as the pre-requisite course(s) have been passed.

The ideal time to make the trip is probably the first week in June, soon after classes are out for the summer. But there is likely to be the Grand Tour set, people who plan on the Sir Christopher Wren tour and then take off for the capitals of Europe. The Wren Institute will manage the classes and the tour, but it’s up to the individual student to swing air transportation to London and back, returning typically at the end of the week or at the end of the summer.  Possibly a charter could be put together if the Wren tour draws enough students, but even then management of the trip would be a whole lot easier if transportation were left to the individual student. Besides, learning how to travel is part of the game plan.

Student housing, on the other hand, would be the responsibility of the Wren Institute. The International Hall at the University of London is a good illustration of what’s available at a weekly rate in a student environment. A hundred Wren students with shared rooms and cafeteria breakfasts could come out of negotiations at the University of London with a good price per student. A major urban university campus, the University of London has the British Library on its north edge and the British Museum on its south boundary.

In the middle of football season, the Tigers and the Gamecocks dominate the local newspapers with some help from the Bulldogs, the Terriers, and the Blue Devils. Students are identified with their mascots, understandably proud and even a little noisy about who goes where and who beat whom last weekend.

For the first week of June every year beginning in the not-too-distant future, we can hope, Londoners will see college T-shirts in concentrated clusters of kids from South Carolina. “Oh hell,” they’ll say, “here come the Carolina Wrens.”

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