Sheldonian Theatre

Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury and Warden of All Souls, paid for a ceremonial hall so that Oxford's degree congregations and the university press's licensing business could move out of the University Church, where they had become disruptively secular. It was Wren's first major building, designed while he still held the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford rather than any architectural post, and its central problem was structural rather than stylistic: a room some seventy feet wide needed a roof with no supporting columns to block sightlines. Wren solved it with the mathematician John Wallis, using a grid of short trussed timbers keyed together so that the whole roof behaves as a single flat, self-supporting truss, a design later engineers judged sound enough that it needed no repair for two centuries. Robert Streater's ceiling, painted in 1669 and restored between 2004 and 2008, shows Truth descending to expel Ignorance from the Arts and Sciences. Outside, a fence of grotesque carved stone heads faces Broad Street, popularly called the Emperors' Heads, though no one has ever securely identified which emperors, if any, they represent.