represents the Jacobethan manner. Still more distant in time, style and method of construction is the University of Auckland's clock tower building, also known as the Old Arts Building, completed in 1926 and designed by R.A. Lippincott in a very loosely interpreted Gothic manner. (It was built with a steel reinforced concrete frame.) In Australia Edmund Blacket’s principal range for the University of Sydney is another building of parallel purpose and period, as is the University of Adelaide’s Venetian Gothic Mitchell Building, designed by William McMinn in 1882, although that is smaller than its Sydney or Dunedin counterparts. The principal building for Ormond College, an affiliate of the University of Melbourne, is also comparable. While it houses a residential college, not a university or its administration, it is another Victorian, university Gothic Revival building and was directly inspired by Scott’s structure for Glasgow. Its oldest part was opened in 1881; it was expanded in stages up to 1893 and then further in the 1920s and later. Like the Otago building it forms part of a quadrangle and has a clock tower. It was designed by Joseph Reed for Presbyterian proprietors. It is undoubtedly a fine building but its symmetrical principal façade lacks the grand extension of Otago’s comparable elevation and the austerity of the latter’s rusticated bluestone. Nevertheless Ormond College matches, indeed it probably exceeds, the Dunedin building’s playfulness. All these revivalist structures aimed to create what was really an illusion: as they were intended for universities, it was specifically that of a medieval cloister. They had to serve a practical purpose but needed also to support this fiction. Any assessment of them has to weigh how well they do that. Among its peers the University of Otago’s clock tower building is distinguished by its scale and elaboration, but also by the degree of conviction it succeeds in bringing to this fantasy. The result is a structure of considerable dignity and grandeur. Notes References Ballantyne, Dorothy (1983). ‘Educational Buildings of Otago’ in Porter, Frances (ed), Historic Buildings of New Zealand South Island. Auckland: Methuen New Zealand, pp. 170–177. Entwisle, Rosemary (1999). Dunedin’s Iconic Buildings: The Registry (Clocktower Building), University of Otago. Dunedin: Port Daniel Press. Galer, Lois (comp.) (1989). Historic Buildings of Otago and Southland. Wellington: New Zealand Historic Places Trust. . McCoy, E.J. & Blackman, J.G. (1968). Victorian City of New Zealand, Dunedin: John McIndoe Ltd. McLean, G. (2002).