The building was completed in 1897 as an administrative block: offices along a double-loaded corridor, an arcade on both long elevations, a courtyard in the middle, and a roof designed for a climate the drawings clearly did not understand.
The administration it was built for lasted fifty-one years. The building has since been a produce market, a barracks, a girls’ school, a records office, and a district courthouse, which it remains. It has been continuously occupied for 129 years and has never once been the subject of a conversion project in the modern sense.
The arcade did the work
Every use it has hosted has needed the same three things, and the arcade provides all of them.
It is shade, which in that climate means the external wall behind it never receives direct sun and the rooms are usable without cooling. It is circulation, which means the internal corridor is optional — as a market and as a school, the arcade was the corridor and the internal one became storage. And it is shelter, which means the building has an outdoor room on both sides in a place with a monsoon.
An arcade at 3.4 metres deep on a 4.2 metre column grid is not a decorative gesture. It is a piece of environmental equipment that also happens to be a public space, and it has been repurposed more times than any room in the building.
Rooms that are the same size
The plan is fifteen rooms of almost identical dimensions — 5.6 by 6.8 metres — off a central corridor, with structural masonry cross walls between them.
This is the least sophisticated plan imaginable and it is the reason for the building’s longevity. A room of that size is a classroom, an office, a courtroom for minor matters, a dormitory for twelve, a storeroom, or two market stalls. Nothing about it is optimised for any of these, so nothing about it obstructs any of them.
Compare with what the profession usually produces now: rooms sized precisely to a schedule of accommodation, with a structural strategy that assumes the schedule is permanent. A building of bespoke rooms has one use. A building of ordinary rooms has all of them.
The masonry cross walls matter too. They are load-bearing, so they were never removed, so the plan never got opened out into something that only worked for one occupant.
What has actually needed doing
The maintenance record, where it survives, is instructive.
- The roof has been replaced three times — 1931, 1968, 2004. Each time in a different material, each time on the original timber trusses, which were repaired rather than replaced twice.
- The window joinery has been replaced piecemeal and continuously, which is what joinery is for.
- Services have been added four times, and every time they have run in surface conduit on the corridor walls. There is no service void anywhere in the building and there never has been.
- The masonry has been repointed twice and has never been structurally repaired.
That last line is the whole argument for solid construction, and the surface conduit is the whole argument against integrated services. A building where every pipe and cable is visible and reachable is a building that can be re-serviced by a local contractor in a fortnight, forever.
From the 2004 roof report “Trusses sound. Recommend retention. Original carpenters’ marks visible and consistent with a single-phase construction.”
The lesson is uncomfortable
The building survives because it was generic, generously proportioned, structurally conservative, and cheap to modify. None of those was an ambition. It was a standard colonial office type, built to a pattern book, by an engineer rather than an architect, in a hurry.
That is awkward for a profession that values specificity. The buildings from the same period that were designed for a particular institution with particular requirements have mostly gone, because their requirements went and the buildings could not follow.
There is a version of adaptability that gets designed in deliberately — flexible grids, loose fit, long life. It works, and it should be pursued. But it is worth noticing that the most adaptable buildings we have inherited got there by not being very interested in their own programme, and that the qualities responsible are all quantities: ceiling height, wall thickness, room size, and depth of shade.
