Francis Petre

Francis Petre: New Zealand's Brunelleschi in Concrete

George Bernard Shaw, visiting Christchurch, looked at the green copper dome of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and called its architect the New Zealand Brunelleschi. The comparison was flattering and not quite accurate — Petre had put his dome above the sanctuary rather than the crossing, and beneath the Oamaru limestone the whole thing was monolithic concrete. But Shaw had caught something real. A colonial architect at the far end of the world had built a Renaissance basilica out of a modern material, and made it convincing.

The Aristocratic Inheritance

Francis William Petre was born on 27 August 1847 at Petone, near Lower Hutt, the third of sixteen children of Henry William Petre and Mary Anne Ellen Walmsley. His father was a director of the New Zealand Company, one of the founders of Wellington, and colonial treasurer of New Munster; his grandfather was William Henry Francis Petre, 11th Baron Petre and chairman of the Company. The family descended from Dorothy Wadham, foundress of Wadham College, Oxford. Petre Bay in the Chathams and Wellington's Thorndon carry their names.

They were also one of England's oldest and most influential Catholic families, and this fact organised Petre's entire professional life. Catholicism in nineteenth-century New Zealand was a poor immigrant church, mostly Irish, in urgent need of buildings and short of architects it could trust. Petre was Catholic, aristocratic and technically trained. Every bishop in the country eventually came to him.

The Shipyard Education

His schooling was Catholic and international: Mount St Mary's College, the Jesuit school in Derbyshire, until about 1860; briefly the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth; then Benoît Haffreingue's college at Boulogne-sur-Mer; finally Ushaw College, Durham.

The decisive part came next. From 1864 to 1869 Petre was apprenticed to Joseph Samuda, the London shipbuilder and engineer, and there acquired an expertise in concrete manufacture that no architect in the southern hemisphere possessed. He qualified as both architect and engineer around 1869 and practised briefly in London with Daniel Cubitt Nicholls.

Railways, Then a Practice

He returned to New Zealand in 1872 and went to work for the railway contractors John Brogden and Sons, supervising construction on the Blenheim–Picton and Dunedin–Balclutha lines, tunnelling on the Otago Central Railway, and drainage works on the Taieri Plains. It is an unglamorous apprenticeship that explains a great deal about the buildings that followed. Petre spent his first New Zealand years moving earth and pouring foundations at scale.

In 1875 he opened his own office on Liverpool Street, Dunedin. He was a founding member of the Dunedin Institute of Civil Engineers and Architects in 1876, a founder member of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, its Fellow from 1905 and its President from 1907 to 1908. In 1903, following the death of his father-in-law Edward Cargill, he was appointed Consular Agent for Italy in Dunedin.

Lord Concrete

The nickname was earned immediately. Judge Chapman's house at Dunedin in 1875 went up in unreinforced concrete. Cargill's Castle in 1876 — Italianate, spectacular, perched above the sea — used concrete for roofs and floors as well as walls, with various forms of reinforcement. Then in 1877 came St Dominic's Priory in Dunedin, a Gothic building in concrete that was, and long remained, the largest unreinforced concrete structure in the southern hemisphere. Colleagues began calling him Lord Concrete.

He was using Portland cement to do things nobody in the colony had attempted, and doing them in a country that would discover, in 1931 at Napier and again in 2011 at Christchurch, exactly how much its geology cared about masonry.

The Cathedral at Dunedin

St Joseph's Cathedral, Dunedin, occupied him from 1878 to its consecration in 1886. It is his Gothic masterpiece: French Gothic Revival in black basalt and white Oamaru stone, twin towers, a great central rose window, and a sixty-metre spire that was designed and never built. Petre defended the style in terms of "the great richness and delicacy of detail, and the closer application of geometrical rules" — a revealingly mathematical justification from a man trained in shipyards.

The Basilica Turn

Around the turn of the century he changed direction entirely. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Wellington, designed in 1899, was Palladian: six Ionic columns, a high pediment, a colonnaded nave, a Serlian arch opening to the chancel. It was reconsecrated as a cathedral in 1984.

Then the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament at Christchurch, which grew out of correspondence with Bishop Grimes dated 6 February 1899, was built between 1901 and 1905, cost £52,000, and opened on Sunday 12 February 1905. A run of basilicas followed across the South Island — Sacred Heart at Timaru in 1910, St Patrick's at Waimate in 1913, St Mary's at Invercargill, St Patrick's in South Dunedin in a Palladian Revival manner, and St Patrick's at Oamaru, completed in December 1918.

Alongside them ran the ordinary parish work: Sacred Heart Convent in 1881, the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus at Ashburton in 1882, St Joseph's at Hakataramea about 1885, the Magdalen Asylum at Halswell in 1886, St Patrick's at Greymouth in 1888, St Joseph's at Morven in 1895. Most are now gone.

Petre married Margaret Cargill on 1 March 1881, after a courtship obstructed by the gap between his Catholicism and her Presbyterianism. They had thirteen children. He died at his Dunedin home on 10 December 1918, two days after the opening of the Oamaru basilica, and was buried at Andersons Bay.

Why Francis Is Called a Genius

The strongest case for Petre is technical rather than intellectual, and it should be stated as such. He was the man who understood, decades before his colleagues, that mass concrete could carry monumental architecture — and he understood it because he had learned the material in a shipyard rather than an atelier. St Dominic's Priory and the Christchurch cathedral are engineering arguments dressed in Gothic and Renaissance clothing. Very few nineteenth-century architects anywhere combined that structural literacy with genuine stylistic fluency.

The second claim is about craft. Petre's drawings were so precise and so detailed that stonemasons could execute a design from a single sheet. His Gothic detail has been judged lighter and more delicate than Alfred Waterhouse's and the equal of Pugin's — which, if true, is high praise from a colony of 700,000 people. That is draughtsmanship, a hand-and-eye discipline, not a theory.

The counter-case is blunt and comes from his own advocates. Petre created no distinctive personal style and founded no movement. He worked across Gothic Revival, Renaissance, Palladian and English Cottage as clients required, adapting established styles rather than inventing anything. Shaw's Brunelleschi line was a visitor's compliment, not a scholarly verdict. And the great irony is structural: his most celebrated building, praised for its concrete, was wrecked by the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and February 2011 and demolished in 2021.

What remains is a career of forty-two years in which one man gave a young country most of its monumental Catholic architecture, and did it with a mastery of material that his contemporaries could not match.

Legacy

New Zealand's basilica landscape is essentially Petre's invention — a chain of domed and columned churches from Wellington to Invercargill that gave a poor immigrant church the visual dignity of Rome. St Joseph's still stands over Dunedin, spireless. The Christchurch cathedral is gone. Lord Concrete's reputation rests, appropriately enough, on what was buried under the limestone.

Achievements

• Trained at Mount St Mary's College and Ushaw Historic House, Chapels and Gardens