Old Government Buildings

Look at this building. Sandstone facade. Italian palazzo proportions. Classical columns and arches. Clearly built from stone, right? Wrong. Every centimetre of it is wood. This is the second-largest wooden building in the world — after the Todai-ji temple in Nara, Japan — and the largest wooden building in the Southern Hemisphere. And it's been fooling people on Lambton Quay since eighteen seventy-six.

The architect, William Clayton, designed it to look like stone because stone was what serious government buildings were made of. But New Zealand didn't have a quarrying industry to match, and what it did have was an almost unlimited supply of native kauri timber. So Clayton built the entire thing from wood — a hundred and forty-three rooms, sixty-four toilets, a hundred and twenty-six fireplaces, and twenty-two chimneys — then had the exterior painted and scored to mimic stone. The deception was so convincing that most people walking past today still don't know.

It was built on reclaimed harbour land in just twenty-two months for thirty-nine thousand pounds. And here's a detail that feels very ahead of its time: it was the first building in New Zealand with a smoke-free policy, implemented at opening in eighteen seventy-six. In a country where practically everyone smoked, in a building made entirely of wood, this was less progressive politics and more basic fire safety.

By the nineteen-nineties the building was deteriorating badly. A twenty-five-million-dollar restoration ran from nineteen ninety-four to ninety-six, and it now houses the Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Law. The last of its eight hundred and four sash windows were restored in twenty-twenty-one. Eight hundred and four wooden windows, in a wooden building pretending to be stone, still standing a hundred and fifty years later. It's one of the greatest architectural confidence tricks in the Southern Hemisphere.