Wren's Unfinished Cathedral Plan
Story★★★★There is preserved in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral a plan of a church that was never built. It is the plan of the cathedral that the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, had in mind and heart for the great city of London, but which the conditions and straitened circumstances of the time prevented him from seeing erected, and it is said that the great architect used to sigh bitterly at the contrast between the model which the heavenly genius within him saw and planned, and the actual structure, huge and magnificent though it is, which the stinted means and stinted imagination of that age compelled him to build. He was not able to build according to the pattern showed to him in the mount.
The point
Sir Christopher Wren's ideal cathedral design, preserved only as an unbuilt plan in St. Paul's crypt, symbolizes the gap between divine vision and earthly limitations in all human aspiration.