Making of an architect

Abstract It was not unusual in this period for the well-educated to take up architecture as a gentle- manly activity, widely accepted in theory as a branch of applied mathematics; this is implicit in the writings of Vitruvius and explicit in such sixteenth-century authors as John Dee and Leonard Digges. Wren’s father was a keen and erudite observer of buildings. Oxford saw much fine building throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, and Wren’s own college, Wadham, was a paragon of Jacobean modernity (1610–13). He arrived at Gresham with a far from casual eye, having in Oxford absorbed intuitively the fundamentals of architectural design.