Blog 5: Locovisual

The architectural rights to the Wellington Town Hall were competed for in the year 1900. Joshua Charlesworth won with a neo-classical design. Construction began in May 1902 and the Wellington Town Hall was opened in December 1904.

The Wellington Town Hall is an historically significant building in New Zealand as it "has had [and still does have] strong ties with Wellington residents and their local body of power"(Ian Bowman, 1995). As a building that is related to the governing of what is now the capital city of New Zealand there is an expectation that the building will reflect the values of strength, stability and prosperity that reflect what we expect to see in our mayor and city councillors. The Town Hall announces the presence of these values through recognisable neo-classical features. The exterior walls of the building have repeating flat columns all the way around it, these structurally stable features not only hold up the building, but they announce to us that they are doing their job, holding up the building and (metaphorically) holding up the cities values.

Wellington Town Hall Civic Square - Photographed by Jayden Hamilton

The front entrance of the Town Hall is framed by four large cylindrical columns, they are the obvious  central point, visually leading us to its high ceilings and again reminding us of the building's strength; These columns are adorned with decorative capitols, "true art", as Owen Jones says, "idealising, and not copying, the forms of nature";(1856) a small amount of art which portrays the city's values of prosperity. Some more typically neo-classical architectural features of the Wellington Town Hall include triangular pediments atop of many of the windows, and the delicately carved parapet that wraps around the top of the building.

Wellington Town Hall Front Entrance - Photographed by Jayden Hamilton

Works Cited List

 Bowman, Ian. "Wellington Town Hall." Heritage Buildings Inventory. Vol. 3. [Wellington, N.Z.]: Wellington City Council, 1995. Print.

John Ruskin, "The Nature of Gothic," excerpted in Gorman, C. (2003) The Industrial Design Reader (pp.18-20). New York: Allworth Press.