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Petre, Francis W(illiam)
(b Lower Hutt, 26 Sept 1847; d Dunedin, 10 Dec 1918). New Zealand architect. He was educated at Roman Catholic schools in England and France and was articled (1864–9) to the shipbuilder and engineer Joseph Samuda (1813–85) in London, after which he worked for Daniel Cubitt Nichols ( fl 1856–91). In 1872 he returned to New Zealand as an engineer on railway construction, establishing his own practice in Dunedin in 1875. He carried out a wide range of commercial, domestic and engineering works, but his major architectural commissions came from the Roman Catholic Church. His first important work was the Dominican Priory (1877), Dunedin. Its simplified, angular Gothic forms reveal its monolithic concrete construction. More conventional in form, St Joseph’s Cathedral (begun 1879), Dunedin, is French 13th-century Gothic in style. Petre employed the Gothic style for small parish churches but increasingly favoured classical basilican plans for larger churches. The basilica of the Sacred Heart (1889), Wellington, and St Patrick’s Basilica (1893), Oamaru, preceded his major achievement, the cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament (1901–5), Christchurch. Based on 19th-century French prototypes, notably J.-B. Lepère and J.-I. Hittorff’s church of Vincent-de-Paul (1824–44), Paris, and constructed of concrete sheathed in Oamaru limestone, Christchurch Cathedral is the largest and most imposing classically designed church in New Zealand.
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