The University of Otago Clocktower complex is a group of architecturally and historically significant buildings in the centre of the University of Otago campus. Founded in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1869, the University of Otago was the expression of the province's Scottish founders' commitment to higher education. They were also the inheritors of a strong architectural tradition and gritty determination. Defending the decision to build inexpensive materials in an elaborate historicizing manner the Chancellor, Dr. D.M. Stuart, said "the Council had some old-world notions and liked to have a university with some architectural style". This attitude persisted for over fifty years and resulted in an impressive group of buildings.
Building history
The university was originally housed in William Mason’s post office in what is now the Exchange area of the central city. 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.
This was two of the city blocks surveyed by Charles Kettle bounded by St David Street in the north, Albany Street to the south, Leith Street to the east, and Castle Street on the west side. It was bisected west to east by Union Street. The Water of Leith traversed it from the north running along its Castle Street margin though turning to flow eastward beyond the Union Street crossing. Architectural opinion of the day favored the site now occupied by Otago Boys' High School. The university authorities were under the misapprehension that the city had given up the stretch of Union Street bisecting the site.
An architectural competition was held and was won by Maxwell Bury (1825–1912). His plans to build in brick in the Classical style were changed to build in the Gothic style in stone. His conception was of two parallel ranges running north and south in the more northerly of the two city blocks. One range with a clock tower would face west across the Leith to Castle Street. (University of Otago Clocktower Building.) The other behind it, now called the Geology Block, would run close along the eastern Leith Street boundary. 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.
Construction began in 1878 and it seems the north part of the Geology Block was completed that year while the north part of the Clocktower Building and the Professorial Houses were completed in 1879. Costs to that date were 31,275 pounds. In 1883 Bury was called back to oversee a southward extension of the Geology Block. With this his work on the complex ended.
The resulting two large ranges were of bluestone with Oamaru stone facings and slate roofs on foundations of Port Chalmers breccia. A contemporary described them as “Domestic Gothic, somewhat severe” and as “a venerable pile”.
The reference to “Domestic” Gothic was perhaps inspired by the oriel window and the clock tower on the Clocktower Block but the rows of lancet windows give the structures an ecclesiastical air. They were clearly intended to evoke the ancient university buildings of England and Scotland which represent a domestic type of church architecture. The use of corbels, turrets, and undressed masonry give the buildings a specifically Scottish Baronial feeling.
It has been pointed out the tower shows the influence of Sir George Gilbert Scott’s (1811–1878) University of Glasgow completed in 1870. It does but even at this early stage there were significant differences. Scott’s building was a hilltop monument while this is a low-lying structure in a riverside setting. Bury’s surviving drawings show he intended the ranges to be extended and the Clocktower Block to have a symmetrically balanced principal western facade. In the event the whole group and this particular feature developed differently.
After a long pause, a building for the Dental School was completed on the corner of Castle and Union Streets in 1907 to the design of J.Louis Salmond (1868–1950). (It is now the Staff Club.) In 1908 the School of Mines was constructed, designed by Edmund Anscombe (1874–1948). He now conceived and carried out a different development of the whole complex.