Francis William Petre (27 August 1847 – 10 December 1918), sometimes known as Frank Petre, was a New Zealand-born architect based in Dunedin. He was an able exponent of the Gothic Revival style, one of its best practitioners in New Zealand. He followed the Catholic Church's initiative to build places of worship in Anglo-Saxon countries inspired by Romance forms of architecture. His basilica Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, in Christchurch was demolished in 2021.
Able to work competently in a wide diversity of architectural styles, he was also notable for his pioneering work in concrete development and construction. He designed numerous public and private buildings, many of which are still standing in and around Dunedin. His outstanding buildings are a few of his churches and seminaries, the basis of his international reputation.
Early life
Petre was a descendant of Dorothy Wadham, a progenitrix of an English crypto-Catholic family and the foundress of Wadham College at Oxford in England in the 17th century. In the 19th century the family was again able to declare its faith. The architect's grandfather invested in the second New Zealand Company.
The Petres were an aristocratic family from Ingatestone in Essex, England. Francis Petre's immediate family was one of the first and most prominent colonial families of New Zealand; Petre Bay, Chatham Island was named after them, as—originally—was the town of Wanganui in the North Island. The Wellington suburb of Thorndon was named after their Thorndon Hall estate in England. Petre was the son of the Hon Henry William Petre, who first came to New Zealand in 1840 as director of the New Zealand Company of which his own father, William Henry Francis Petre, 11th Baron Petre, had been chairman. The New Zealand Company had been set up to promote the colonisation of New Zealand, and bought, sometimes dubiously, thousands of hectares of land from the Māori. Consequently, Henry Petre was one of the founders of Wellington. He was also colonial treasurer of New Munster Province. Henry seems to have been a man of strange appearance, from the description by his contemporary, the New Zealand social commentator Charlotte Godley: "He is immensely tall and thin and looks like a set of fire irons badly hung together".
Francis Petre was born in 1847 at Petone, today a suburb of Lower Hutt in the North Island, which was one of the earliest British settlements in New Zealand. In 1855, in the then British colonial tradition, Petre was sent to England to be educated. He attended the Jesuit school Mount St Mary's College near Sheffield in the north of England. After four years, he left to attend the Royal Naval College, then at Portsmouth (the college moved to Greenwich in 1869). Finding himself unsuited to a naval career he pursued his education in France, where he attended the charismatic priest Benoit Haffreingue's college at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Returning to England, he completed his education at Ushaw College, Durham.
Members of British aristocratic families would generally be possessed of a private income and often entered one of the military services or the church, although other professions were becoming increasingly common. As the third son of the younger son of a peer, it was always clear that Petre would have to provide his own income, and consequently he was apprenticed from 1864 to 1869 to Joseph Samuda of London, a shipbuilder and engineer. Here he received his training in the techniques and skills of concrete manufacturing, which he was to employ with great acclaim in his later architectural career.
Around 1869 Petre qualified as an architect and engineer, and after a brief period in private practice in London working for architect and engineer Daniel Cubitt Nicholls he returned to New Zealand in 1872. He was then employed as an engineer by railway contractors Brogden and Sons. During this period, he oversaw the construction of both the Blenheim–Picton and Dunedin–Balclutha railway lines, as well as the draining of parts of the Taieri Plains and the construction of tunnels on the Otago Central Railway, some of which are today open to the public as part of the Otago Central Rail Trail. When these tasks were completed, he set up his own practice as an engineer and architect in Liverpool Street, Dunedin.
Architect
From 1875 Petre seems to have devoted his life to architecture. Working by the standard of his day he designed in the Gothic Revival style, which he praised for
the great richness and delicacy of detail, and the closer application of geometrical rules to architecture–more especially in the window tracery which exhibits greater variety of design, together with an easier and more perfect flow into the various parts of the whole structure.
The English Gothic Revival style had become popular for Protestant church architecture in the British colonies, as it had in Britain itself, following the rise of the Oxford Movement—a school of Anglo-Catholic intellectuals who felt that medieval Gothic architecture inspired a greater spirituality than other styles based on non-Christian temples. The Roman Catholic Church, however, of which Petre was a member, wishing to be distinctive, adopted southern continental forms of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. Thus it was that the Catholic Church gave Petre his greatest opportunities of proving his worth as an architect by producing Cathedrals, Basilicas and churches in revived French and Italian styles.
Petre's early speciality was his work in mass concrete, at the time a novel building material in New Zealand. Widely used by the ancient Romans the formula for making it was lost and a new one only invented in the 18th century. Three of Petre's earliest projects were all constructed in this material: Judge Chapman's house (today known as "Castlamore" or "Woodside"), the clifftop villa nicknamed Cargill's Castle in 1876, and St. Dominic's Priory in 1877. However, according to the whims of his patrons, he did also work with more conventional building materials. Recent analysis of the concrete in the Chapman house reveals unreinforced concrete walls, and imported Portland cement used as a binder. It is one of the earliest Portland cement concrete buildings in New Zealand. Cargill's Castle, built only a year or so later has some concrete roofs and floors, and a number of different types of reinforcement.
St Dominic's Priory, Dunedin
Petre described the style of his 1876–77 creation, St Dominic's Priory, as Anglo-Saxon, referring to the straight-sloped window apertures. The style of the building, however, was very much of Petre's own interpretation and only lightly influenced by Anglo-Saxon architecture.
The building is notable for its use of poured concrete, a comparatively new building material in 1870s New Zealand, but one well suited to the creation of the large number of windows in the building's facade. The structure is simultaneously grand and austere, reflecting well its use as a convent.
St Dominic's Priory was the largest un-reinforced concrete building in the southern hemisphere (steel reinforcing being then a little used construction method), and earned Petre the lasting nickname of "Lord Concrete".
Cathedrals F. W. Petre designed three of New Zealand's cathedrals, each distinguished by a different architectural style: St Joseph's Cathedral in Dunedin, the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Wellington and the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Christchurch.
1878 St Joseph's Cathedral, Dunedin While Petre designed many churches, schools, public buildings, and private houses, his largest and grandest project, the Roman Catholic cathedral at Dunedin, was never fully completed. The entrance facade and the nave are built to the original design, and reveal the cathedral as a prime example of the French Gothic Revival. St Joseph's Cathedral, standing next to St Dominic's Priory, is reminiscent of many of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, with its twin towers and central rose window—Chartres and Notre Dame come to mind, although the original design if completed with its tower would have produced a building more like Rouen Cathedral. The architect's intention was for a mighty structure, with the twin towers dwarfed by a lofty spire some 60 metres (200 ft) in height, which would have been a magnificent edifice. In the event, the project stalled when a prudent Roman Catholic diocese reluctant to incur unnecessary debt with the onset of the 1880s depression postponed further work.
Petre's intention, which is clear from the almost 90 pages of drawings held in the diocesan archives, was to design the most impressive cathedral in Australasia. Building began in 1878 and the structure was consecrated in 1886. Its construction is notable for its foundations: 40 massive concrete piles, each over 1.2 metres (four feet) in width, sunk 10 metres (35 ft) into the ground, give the cathedral a firm foundation on the volcanic bedrock. The nave is 24 metres (80 ft) in length and 16 metres (52 ft) in height. The walls are in black basalt with dressings of white Oamaru stone, a combination for which Dunedin and Christchurch architecture is noted (see also Dunedin Railway Station). Petre was later to have two further opportunities for cathedral design, but St. Joseph's remains his largest work in the Gothic style.
1901 Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Wellington
That Wellington's principal Roman Catholic cathedral is today a small, but quite perfect, Romano-Grecian temple is entirely the result of chance. The Sacred Heart Basilica, now a cathedral, was originally designed and conceived as a church to mark the site of the fire-gutted St Mary's Cathedral. Petre had strong family connections to the site, as it and an adjacent plot, now the site of St Mary's College, had been given to the Roman Catholic Church by his father and grandfather. The original cathedral, a grand Gothic structure complete with flying buttresses, had been built in 1850 but was destroyed by fire in 1898. Within two days Petre had been asked to design a new church on the site. A decision was taken, however, to build the new Cathedral nearer the more densely populated areas of Wellington, Te Aro and Newtown. Petre later published plans for this cathedral in 1903, describing his proposed structure as "Roman, bordering on to Florentine Renaissance, treated liberally". This cathedral project never came to fruition, but what was quickly constructed was the Church, or Basilica, of "The Sacred Heart" on the razed cathedral site.
Architectural ideas of the mid-19th century advanced by such architects as Pugin, and still adhered to by the recently deceased prominent New Zealand architect Benjamin Mountfort, decreed that only Gothic was suitable for Christian worship. Ignoring these old-fashioned and now expensive rules, Petre designed the new church in the Palladian style, which in this country had only a few years before been considered almost too heretical for worship.
The design was theatrical in the extreme. The imposing principal facade of Oamaru Stone consisted almost solely of one huge portico constructed of six ionic columns, while the facade was crowned by a high pediment more in the style of Vitruvius than Palladio, and behind the great facade stretched the single body of the church, with the remaining facades in a less severe Romanesque style. Considering that his brief was that "a serviceable church in brick should be erected on the site of the old Cathedral", it is amazing that such an almost avant-garde style should have been permitted. The completed structure would not be out of place in 17th century or 18th century Rome or Venice.