University of Otago Staff Club

Story

The University of Otago Registry Building, also known as the Clocktower Building, is a Victorian and later structure in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. It stands next to the banks of the Water of Leith and is constructed from contrasting dark Leith Valley basalt and Oamaru stone, with a foundation of Port Chalmers breccia. The building houses the administrative centre of the university, and the office of the Vice-Chancellor. It has a Category I listing with Heritage New Zealand.It is the principal element of the Clocktower complex, the group of Gothic revival buildings at the heart of the University of Otago’s campus. (University of Otago Clocktower complex.) The most prominent of the group it was designed and re-designed by Maxwell Bury (1825–1912) and Edmund Anscombe (1874–1948), between the 1870s and the 1920s. This resulted in a revised geometry and a change to the original conception.HistoryBury first conceived a classical building which he re-dressed in the Gothic manner to suit the university council’s desires. 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. For his principal range Bury proposed a building with a single forward gable at its northern extremity, a clock tower and gabled entrance at its centre, and another, single forward gable at the south, housing a chapel. By 1879 the tower and the northern extension from it had been built.