"...Wren built St. Stephen's Walbrook as one of the parish churches to replace those destroyed in the 1666 conflagration. Here it is Wren as geometrician who dominates, for the design of the building is based on a series of abstract figures that in the complexity of their formal interaction recall the structures of Byzantium. Within a rectangular outline is nested a square space defined by twelve columns and covered by a huge dome. The circular base of the dome is not carried, in the conventional way, by pendentives formed above the arches of the square, but on a circle formed by eight arches that spring from eight of the twelve columns, cutting across each corner in the manner of the Byzantine squinch."

—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p382.