This is like the genesis of Sir Charles Barry’s and A. W. N. Pugin’s designs for the Palace of Westminster which is symmetrical in plan but late Gothic in its realisation.

In 1968 Ted McCoy drew a parallel between this building and Sir George Gilbert Scott’s for Glasgow University which was finished in 1870.

Scott's building's main elevation, like the one Bury initially designed for Otago, is symmetrical with its tower and entrance at the centre.

But the Otago building, as Anscombe completed it, gains something, because its disproportionately long southward reach exceeds one's expectation.

Also, its apparently pragmatic extrapolation supports the impression it is a medieval building, extended over centuries without undue deference to an original plan.

They have their origins in Flemish and Netherlandish civic buildings of the late Middle Ages but in this revived, Victorian form are part of a family which includes A.W.

For a long time the Otago tower was blind but in the 1930s Thomas Sidey, a local politician and a member of the university council, paid for a clock to be installed.

The caretaker's house, visibly incorporated into the rear of the northernmost compartment externally, is now internally part of the administrative suite.

[6] Also in the 1960s part of the inner quadrangle wall, the east elevation, was elaborately demolished and rebuilt a short distance further eastward, blurring some original features.

It is undoubtedly a fine building but its symmetrical principal façade lacks the grand extension of Otago’s comparable elevation and the austerity of the latter’s rusticated bluestone.

Among its peers the University of Otago’s clock tower building is distinguished by its scale and elaboration, but also by the degree of conviction it succeeds in bringing to this fantasy.