page_title: William Mason (architect)
section_title: Early career in Dunedin
hierarchical_section_title: William Mason (architect) / Early career in Dunedin
context_page_description: William Mason was a New Zealand architect born in Ipswich, England, the son of an architect/builder George Mason and Susan, née Forty. Trained by his father he went to London where he seems to have worked for Thomas Telford. He studied under Peter Nicholson before eventually working for Edward Blore. In 1831 he married Sarah Nichols, a Berkshire woman apparently fifteen years older than he was. A son was born in the first year of their marriage. In 1836 he returned to Ipswich to practise. Having worked at Lambeth Palace he had attracted the interest of the bishop of London, who now employed him independently designing churches and parsonages. These included three commissions for churches in Essex: St Lawrence, East Donyland; St Botolph, Colchester; and St James, Brightlingsea. The most remarkable of these is St Botolph's in white brick and Norman style. Apparently Georgian in plan and in its interior it strikes a Medieval note outside. St James, also white brick and in the lancet style and resembling some of Blore's work, is very like St Paul's Church Auckland which Mason built a few years later.
context_section_description: In the south the capital of the Presbyterian special settlement was mushrooming into a frontier city. Mason formed a partnership with David Ross (1827–1908) a Scottish-born Fellow of the Institute of British Architects who was already resident. There now followed numerous projects and a series of changing partnerships. The one with Ross was dissolved early in 1863. Of numerous small commissions the Dunedin Public Warehouse, for William Dalrymple, now 386 Princes Street, is a more substantial example. 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. Those around the windows rise to form round-topped columns. 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. Again there were parallels with the second Government House but the bank, like the warehouse, and like the bank's counterpart in Wellington, also designed by Mason at this time, has been characterised as exhibiting an admirable "brawny simplicity" reminiscent of Robert Adam. Adjacent to the bank was a three-story office for T.B. Gillies which now saw Mason flourishing forth with a contrastingly exuberant and delicate Venetian design. It had paired, arcaded windows on the upper floors and sculpted heads over the columns. Sadly this building doesn't survive. 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. It has been said it has been largely demolished but while remodelled still mostly survives, or did until its demolition in 2009. Mason had a number of staff at this busy time, including his clerk of works, N.Y.A. Wales. By the end of 1863 he had bought land in London Street and there built a house for himself. 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. It too survives at 104 London Street and is best known for the adjoining Globe Theatre, Dunedin. In early 1864 Mason entered into a partnership with William Clayton (1823–77).
  He now received more substantial commissions, two of them the greatest undertakings attempted in New Zealand up till then: the building for the New Zealand Exhibition and a new post office for the Otago provincial government. The first was completed in 1865 the second in 1868. The exhibition building had been conceived with additional pavilions, evident in a water colour by the artist George O'Brien. O'Brien also depicted the new post office, a structure so grand that before its completion it was decided it needed a higher purpose.
  The exhibition building was a twin-towered palazzo in stuccoed brick, with corner turrets and the bold quoining already exhibited in the Dunedin Public Warehouse. It had a central, covered courtyard and was a descendant of Charles Fowler's design for the Covent Garden market building in London. It was situated on Great King Street and afterward became the city's hospital, serving the purpose until its demolition in 1933.
  The post office, better known as the Stock Exchange (Exchange Building, Dunedin), was Mason's greatest achievement. It was built between 1864 and 1868. Described at the time as the finest building in the colony, it was a notable aesthetic success. 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. It was symme
caption: George O'Brien's c. 1865 watercolour of the Dunedin Post Office, designed by William Mason
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