TE RANGIHĪROA IS THE FIRST PURPOSE-BUILT college at New Zealand’s most collegiate university since the Ted McCoy-designed UniCol opened in 1969. If its novelty makes it notable, its size makes it significant. The $104-million building, more than 14,000 square metres in area, houses 450 University of Otago students in two conjoined six-floor blocks, five minutes’ walk from the main campus. This part of north Dunedin already had some hefty buildings: the Gregg’s factory, Forsyth Barr Stadium and the former dairy factory that, since 1998, has housed the Hocken Library. Even so, Te Rangihīroa stands out as a Gulliver in the Lilliput of its immediate, two-storey neighbourhood. (Urban design was not part of the brief.) It unequivocally advertises the importance to Dunedin of the country’s oldest university, an institution to which a quarter of the city’s population of 130,000 is in some way connected.
But there’s more to Te Rangihīroa’s significance than its scale. The building is a statement of – as they might say at Otago’s still-extant Classics department variety. It is a realisation of current thinking about a building type and an expression, also, of the University of Otago’s unique selling proposition in an academic system that functions as a competitive market. Otago’s offering of an intense undergraduate experience begins with residence close to the campus in one of 15 colleges, as the halls of residence are locally called. All are owned by or affiliated to the university, and three-quarters of Otago’s 4000 first-year students live in them. (Next stop, for the second-years who are up for it: one of the fabled flats in the student enclave centred on Castle Street North.)
