A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival (review)

A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival, by Ian Lochhead; pp. ix + 364. Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press, 1999, NZ$ 79.95.

Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort (1825-1898) ranks as New Zealand's most important and productive architect of the Gothic Revival. It is thus fitting that a monograph devoted to his long career should finally appear. This well-documented and lucidly written volume by Ian Lochhead brings together some twenty years of the author's research on Mountfort and his circle. The book is significant not only for the history of architecture in New Zealand, but also for the history of the Gothic Revival in general. For much too long, study of this movement has focused almost exclusively on developments in Britain, America, and, to a lesser extent, Continental Europe. In Chris Brooks's recent survey, The Gothic Revival (1999), advertised on the back cover as "the first book to deal comprehensively" with this topic, New Zealand and Australia are indeed mentioned, but they only rate a single page of text. Clearly, the original contributions emanating from these countries cannot be discussed in so little space, the result being that Australasian developments fail to be woven into the global history of the Gothic Revival. Regretfully, South America is even worse off; the substantial neo-Gothic monuments erected there have been totally ignored, if in fact they are known at all to European and American scholars of the Gothic Revival. If the entire southern hemisphere is still largely terra incognita, Lochhead's clear, intelligent book will redress some of the imbalance. The author's analysis of Mountfort's architecture unfolds along a well-defined trajectory of problems and issues, revealing the architect's originality and defining his place within the Gothic Revival.

The main thrust of the book is architectural. Throughout the entire volume, but more particularly in the first third, Lochhead pays careful attention to the underlying meaning and role of the Gothic style for British colonists hoping to forge in a distant land a community free of the social and economic ills that beset the mother country, while still recognizably and nostalgically British. Erecting Gothic-style buildings in New Zealand was thus more than just a fashionable exercise in Victorian taste; it expressed a conscious desire to recreate the architectural and cultural landscape of Britain as the colonists thought it once was and wished it to be, unspoiled by overcrowding and industrial blight. Mountfort had the good fortune to find himself in a situation where he could shape the dreams of his transplanted compatriots. Arriving in Canterbury in 1850, ten years after its establishment on the South Island, Mountfort was already a trained architect and sympathetic to the religious ideology that underpinned colonization efforts there. Nonetheless, he was severely tested as an architect. As Lochhead vividly explains, Mountfort's difficulties arose from New Zealand's geography and colonial situation. The country's forceful winds, the ever-present danger of earthquakes, the lack of quality building stone in some regions, the shortage of skilled labor, and the modesty of nearly every building budget were challenges with which Mountfort had to deal throughout his career. The way he learned from and then rose above each of these obstacles is perhaps the book's most important theme.

Working far "from the centres of European architectural innovation" (100) had no adverse effects on Mountfort; instead the distance helped him find his own voice and make some distinct contributions to Gothic Revival architecture. At the same time, working in isolation did not prevent Mountfort from taking up some of the stylistic and formal issues that occupied English architects. Mountfort probably obtained most of his knowledge concerning the latest European trends through engraved illustrations of new structures published in trade journals, such as The Builder, though he also experienced High Victorian architecture at first hand during his one trip back to England in 1883. Mountfort's design...