William Mason (architect)

[2] Having worked at Lambeth Palace he had attracted the interest of the bishop of London, who now employed him independently designing churches and parsonages.

He had a success in winning first and second prizes for a new Mechanics' Institute, submitting Gothic and Classical designs, a sign of the rising competition between these styles.

He had bought land and now built on it without making a fortune, put up premises for the New Zealand Banking Company and designed houses.

[13] Mason was living at Howick late in 1854 when he was appointed architect of the 10,000 pound project to build a new Government House.

The bank had early information about the discovery of gold in Otago, which was then transforming the colony's prospects and was soon to change its demography.

Mason formed a partnership with David Ross (1827–1908) a Scottish-born Fellow of the Institute of British Architects who was already resident.

[19] A three-story building in brick it has a vigorously modelled street front with emphatic quoining used to define the edges and apertures of the facade.

There are echoes here of the fenestration of the second Government House but the relative simplicity and strength of the Dunedin building shows the designer his own master again and possessed of a corresponding new confidence.

Mason also designed a number of houses at this time but his Bank of New Zealand, also on Princes Street, attracted particular attention.

Described as of a "general Grecian Style" it was a stone built two-story structure on the site of William Armson's later, magnificent replacement.

[21] Another substantial commission for the Bank of Australasia in High Street was a further contrast, a more obviously Victorian building whose elaborate ironwork reflected the connection between Dunedin and Melbourne at the time.

Two-storey and Italianate it was another timber building treated to resemble stone, like the second Government House, but a tall structure, with some good interior plaster work.

O'Brien also depicted the new post office, a structure so grand that before its completion it was decided it needed a higher purpose.

It had a central, covered courtyard and was a descendant of Charles Fowler's design for the Covent Garden market building in London.

A two-story stone building it was tendered at 22,960 pounds, occupied most of a city block and was another palazzo, arcaded and with a 120-foot high clock tower above the central entrance.

Transferred to the university, for which purpose it wasn't suited, it became the premises of the Colonial Bank of New Zealand, and then the Stock Exchange suffering unfortunate modifications along the way.

At this time Mason and Clayton had also completed the large bond store later known as Edinburgh House and the Otago Provincial Council building on blocks immediately adjacent to the post office.

With its departure from a scholarly adherence to the Early Pointed manner of the Gothic style it also marks the onset of High Victorianism in New Zealand.

[32] Recessed from the street and ornamented with gas lamps and pillars, it won high praise and a careful description from the Otago Daily Times.

Mason retired from architectural practice when he became Mayor and subsequently devoted himself to an estate in north Otago, the Punchbowl at Maheno.

St Matthew's, in Caversham bluestone with unusual Port Chalmers stone dressings, is a large church, of strong design, very English in feeling, with aisles and octagonal piers.

[36] Mason was still designing, completing the Otepopo Presbyterian church and the Standard Insurance Company's office in Princes Street (the Clarion building), in 1874, both of which survive.

[37] He became active in public affairs there, later moved further into the high country to Paradise at the head of Lake Wakatipu, before eventually returning to Dunedin at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1898.

[38] John Stacpoole, Mason's biographer, made a careful comparison of his architecture against his peers', and found him superior to most of his contemporaries.

[39] This seems reasonable, although of his strict contemporaries there were relatively few in New Zealand and fewer still when Mason made his greatest contribution after his move to Dunedin.

There it is natural to measure him against younger men such as R.A. Lawson (1833–1902) and Francis Petre (1847–1918), both acknowledged eminences among New Zealand's Victorian architects.

Mason's active career did overlap Lawson's, though scarcely Petre's, but the comparison is somewhat skewed because these practitioners represented significantly different moments of architectural thought.