University of Otago Clocktower complex

Defending the decision to build in expensive materials in an elaborate historicizing manner, the chancellor, Donald Stuart, said "the Council had some old-world notions and liked to have a university with some architectural style".

It was decided the building and the location was unsuitable and the university managed to acquire the site then housing the Botanic Gardens in North Dunedin beside the Water of Leith.

There would be four professorial houses in two semidetached blocks, in brick in the Queen Anne Style, immediately to the north, facing St David Street.

[9] The resulting two large ranges were of bluestone with Oamaru stone facings and slate roofs on foundations of Port Chalmers breccia.

They were clearly intended to evoke the ancient university buildings of England and Scotland which represent a domestic type of church architecture.

Bury’s surviving drawings show he intended the ranges to be extended and the Clocktower Block to have a symmetrically balanced principal western facade.

[22] After the 1929 flood, which damaged the Union Street vehicle bridge, it was repaired and furnished with ornamental bluestone and ironwork to match the buildings.

Across Union Street from that he started another quadrangle, its west flank formed by the Home Science Building set high on a cliff above the Leith.

He also subtly recomposed the Clocktower Block with the double gables of its western façade's southernmost extremity balancing the asymmetry created by the further extension of this reach from the tower which had originally been intended as the centre of the composition.

Even Anscombe's infill buildings and blind walls contrive to seem not haphazard, utilitarian interventions but manifestations of the slow, organic evolution of centuries.

The result was an apparently self-contained, inward-focused cloister, the turreted precinct of other-worldly scholars, presenting a proud exterior face which could be viewed and its clock tower admired, from Castle Street, across the stream, or from several other points.

The internal courtyard was a self-contained world of ecclesiastical Gothic bluestone, its textures and carefully wrought details the sources of intimate pleasure and delight.

In that time revivalist architecture fell out of fashion and by the late 1950s, it was being suggested by the Ministry of Works that the Clocktower Building should be demolished as an earthquake risk.

But when it did, at last, extend the complex it placed a standard Education Department teaching block at right angles to the Home Science School, forming the southern flank of Anscombe's next intended quadrangle, but now in Modernist design.

)[28] The theatre block is a Modernist structure of cruciform plan with fair face concrete walls patterned into ribs to relieve their monotony.

It visibly leaves the way clear for vehicles to approach along the line of Union Street to arrive at the complex's formal entrance, Anscombe's Archway.

In the 1990s there was a contentious plan to build a new vehicular bridge at this point across the Leith to the Clocktower Block and then another for one further upstream which would have necessitated removing the St David Street footbridge.

But consent has been granted to broaden the river channel into Castle Street and to replace the old, formally modeled, high retaining walls with more fluid, lower, Modernist ones.

Indeed, directly comparable complexes to the Otago and Canterbury ones, intended to accommodate university institutions and aiming to emulate medieval cloisters, were never built in Auckland and Wellington, the sites of New Zealand's other two 19thC tertiary foundations.

More distant in time is the group centred on Winthrop Hall in Perth for the University of Western Australia which was opened in 1932, designed by Conrad Sayce in what has been called a Romanesque Revival style.

Yale University is noted for its principally Collegiate Gothic campus and has a number of such buildings, constructed of unreinforced stone, between 1917 and 1931, including Harkness Tower.

There are courtyards and the buildings are mostly Romanesque and Gothic revival built between then and 1929, including Knox College, University of Toronto finished in 1915.

The University of Leeds’s Clothworkers Court was also designed by Alfred Waterhouse, in a revived Tudor Gothic style, though built-in brick and completed in 1879.

It is connected to the Baines Wing started in 1882 and embraces the Great Hall designed by Cuthbert Brodrick and opened in 1894, all in a similar manner.

They are designed in the same revived Tudor Gothic style in brick and make an attractive group linked to the modernist Alfred Denny Building.

These domed brick buildings are said to have been inspired by the Palazzo Pubblico in the Piazza del Campo in Siena and were conceived as a walled city of scholars rather than as a cloister.

From about this time forms of classical revival architecture tended to be favored for university groups, projecting a different fiction, that of a Temple of the Muses or of an ancient Greek Academy.

By comparison with its true peers the Otago group is distinguished by its stone construction, its scale in the Australasian context, its picturesque setting, completeness, and relative freedom from distracting other elements, and also by the austerity of its treatment and the grandeur it manages to project.