Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort 1825–1898: A bicentennial tribute

When St Mary’s Professional-Cathedral in Parnell was consecrated on 25 August 1898, it was described as “second to no constructing of the type within the colony, and in level of design, completeness and wonder reaches a excessive degree mark not but approached within the diocese”. This was a tribute that got here too late for the architect, Benjamin Mountfort, who had died earlier that yr on 15 March, simply two days after his 73rd birthday. St Mary’s was his final, and positively his largest, timber church and, arguably, one of many most interesting timber Gothic church buildings on this planet. Inside New Zealand, it’s bigger and extra unified in design than Frederick Thatcher’s Previous St Paul’s in Wellington and extra organically conceived as a timber construction than is William Fitzjohn Crisp’s St Michael and All Angels in Christchurch. Neither Richard Upjohn’s timber church buildings in america nor Edward Medley’s in New Brunswick, Canada, are its equal. St Mary’s is, in actual fact, the end result of greater than 50 years of ecclesiologically impressed timber church constructing in New Zealand, one among this nation’s excellent contributions to world structure.

Benjamin Mountfort was born in England, 200 years in the past on 13 March 1825. He grew up in Birmingham, the place, as an adolescent, he witnessed the development of Sir Charles Barry’s and Augustus Welby Pugin’s Edward VI Grammar College on the alternative aspect of the road from the place he lived. Barry and Pugin’s collaboration was, successfully, a costume rehearsal for his or her later and better-known partnership on the Palace of Westminster in London, the primary nice constructing venture of the Victorian interval. Mountfort absorbed Pugin’s writings from an early age; his private copy of Pugin’s True Ideas is inscribed with the date 1841, the yr of its publication. He educated with the main Gothic Revival architect Richard Cromwell Carpenter and, perhaps, Carpenter’s church designs for British colonies impressed Mountfort to to migrate to the Canterbury Affiliation’s New Zealand settlement in 1850. He arrived in Lyttelton on 16 December 1850 and, aside from a return journey to England in 1883, he remained in Canterbury for the remainder of his life.

Mountfort was distinctive amongst colonial architects for his constant software to his occupation; aside from his first few years in Christchurch, when he ran a bookshop, took photographic portraits and taught drawing at Christ’s School, he by no means undertook work exterior his occupation. The fee to design the Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings in 1855, though not commenced till 1858, ensured a variety of labor from the Provincial Authorities and culminated within the addition of the Stone Council Chamber and Refreshment Rooms in 1865. The architecturally creative and richly polychromed Council Chamber has obtained worldwide recognition as an impressive Victorian Gothic inside; its destruction throughout the Christchurch earthquakes was a catastrophic loss to our architectural heritage.

Mountfort’s profession as a church architect started inauspiciously. Holy Trinity, Lyttelton, begun in 1852, was an bold timber-framed church with brick infill: a medieval system of building that should have appeared applicable to the primitive state of the brand new colony. Nevertheless, Mountfort hadn’t counted on New Zealand timbers behaving in several methods from that of the inexperienced oak utilized in Britain for any such building; the framing twisted and warped, rendering the constructing unsafe. It was ultimately dismantled and the timber reused elsewhere. Regardless of this setback, Mountfort designed, from 1855 onwards, quite a few timber church buildings for Anglican parishes all through Christchurch and Canterbury, every one having, as Samuel Hurst Seager famous in 1900, “some particular function making it distinctive; but in all there’s an expression of particular person feeling, giving them – easy and cheap although they’re — a excessive place amongst our architectural works”. These qualities had been celebrated 50 years later in W.A. Sutton’s iconic, regionalist panorama, Nor’wester within the cemetery (1950). Mountfort’s wood church buildings vary in dimension from the tiny St Peter’s, Teddington, (1871) to the grand at St Paul’s, Papanui, (1876–1878) however all share a standard vocabulary of steeply pitched roofs, vertical board and batten cladding, lively string programs that replicate the liturgical capabilities of the inside, open timber roofs and, within the bigger examples, arcades of huge timber posts with arched braces. Amongst this wealth of wood buildings, St Mary’s, Otaio, in South Canterbury, is a notable exception, a jewel-like memorial church of crisply detailed limestone, trying as contemporary as we speak because it did when it was accomplished in 1880.

Though he was initially unsuccessful in gaining the place of supervising architect for George Gilbert Scott’s design for Christ Church Cathedral when building started in 1864, he assumed that function when work recommenced in earnest in 1873 and noticed the constructing by to the completion of nave and tower in 1881. He was accountable for the redesign of the spire and the furnishing of the constructing, in addition to for the short-term wood chancel that served till the completion of the transepts and choir in 1901. By the mid-1870s, with work on the Cathedral advancing, Mountfort was engaged in a variety of buildings that helped to outline the architectural character of Victorian Christchurch.

On the Canterbury Museum, between 1870 and 1882, he designed, in stone and timber, a sequence of galleries that was a colonial response to the iron and glass halls of Deane and Woodward’s Oxford College Museum of Pure Historical past (1855–1860). Adjoining to the museum, his buildings for Canterbury School advanced over the subsequent 20 years, from 1876 to 1896, right into a exceptional advanced of Victorian Gothic buildings, establishing the architectural character of the school to which subsequent architects adhered properly into the twentieth century.

Mountfort’s use of a saddleback roof on the clock tower of his first faculty constructing and the segmental arch of its entrance gave Canterbury School a distinctly totally different architectural character from that of the neighbouring museum; he clearly needed to make sure that the town’s structure achieved selection whereas nonetheless conforming to the dominant Gothic Revival model. The Nice Corridor of what’s now The Arts Centre of Christchurch Te Matatiki Toi Ora exhibits the liberty that Mountfort had achieved by the Eighties in manipulating the vocabulary of medieval structure in an authentic and private manner. The type of the roof is generated by the segmental arch of the massive, north window. Its curvature defines the form of the ridge and furrow ceiling and necessitated the discount of the inside roof span by using hammer beams. Though the elements of the design are conventional, they’re mixed in an sudden and authentic method. In contrast to the polychromatic richness of the sooner Provincial Council Chamber, the School Corridor makes use of a extra delicate palette, creating what was described as a ‘symphony of native timbers’ by the juxtaposition of woods from totally different native species.

All through a profession of practically 50 years in New Zealand, Mountfort maintained exemplary skilled requirements and was, in his function as first president of the Canterbury Affiliation of Architects, a pioneer within the course of that led to the muse of the New Zealand Institute of Architects in 1905. He was adventurous in exploring new supplies, together with each concrete and iron, and his designs for furnishings and stained glass reveal the identical inventiveness as that utilized to his buildings. Nearly 60 years in the past, Paul Pascoe, a pioneering modernist, recognised the importance of Mountfort’s contribution to New Zealand structure, describing him as “an architectural big among the many sandhills, swamps and open areas of the Canterbury Plains… a genius working within the uncooked supplies and severely crude limitations of the early days…”. Pascoe recognised Mountfort as a founding father of New Zealand structure and it’s for this achievement, 200 years after his start, that we must always proceed to have a good time him as we speak.