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A Dream of Spires: Benjamin Mountfort and the Gothic Revival, by Ian Lochhead; pp. ix + 364. Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press, 1999, NZ$ 79.95.
Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort (1825-1898) ranks as New Zealand's most important and productive architect of the Gothic Revival. It is thus fitting that a monograph devoted to his long career should finally appear. This well-documented and lucidly written volume by Ian Lochhead brings together some twenty years of the author's research on Mountfort and his circle. The book is significant not only for the history of architecture in New Zealand, but also for the history of the Gothic Revival in general. For much too long, study of this movement has focused almost exclusively on developments in Britain, America, and, to a lesser extent, Continental Europe. In Chris Brooks's recent survey, The Gothic Revival (1999), advertised on the back cover as "the first book to deal comprehensively"with this topic, New Zealand and Australia are indeed mentioned, but they only rate a single page of text. Clearly, the original contributions emanating from these countries cannot be discussed in so little space, the result being that Australasian developments fail to be woven into the global history of the Gothic Revival. Regretfully, South America is even worse off; the substantial neo-Gothic monuments erected there have been totally ignored, if in fact they are known at all to European and American scholars of the Gothic Revival. If the entire southern hemisphere is still largely...