Parliament Library

New Zealand Parliament Buildings house the New Zealand Parliament and are on a 45,000 square metre site at the northern end of Lambton Quay, Wellington. They consist of the Edwardian neoclassical-style Parliament House (1922); the Parliamentary Library (1899); the executive wing, called "The Beehive" (1977); and Bowen House, in use since 1991. Whilst most of the individual buildings are outstanding for different reasons, the overall setting that has been achieved "has little aesthetic or architectural coherence".

The Parliamentary Library

Completed in 1899, the Parliamentary Library is the oldest of the buildings. It stands to the north of Parliament House (to its right, looking from the front).

The library was designed in Gothic revival style and was fire resistant, being constructed of masonry. The third story of the design was not built to save money. It had an iron fire-door separating the library from the main entrance section. This saved the library from the fire of 1907 which destroyed the rest of the timber parliament buildings. Coincidentally, exactly the same thing happened in Ottawa in 1916—with fire doors saving the Library when the Centre Block of the Canadian Parliament burned.

Like Parliament House the library was strengthened and refurbished in the 1990s. It still houses Parliament's library. The building is registered with Heritage New Zealand (previously known as the New Zealand Historic Places Trust) as a Category I heritage structure with registration number 217.

Text imported from Wikipedia article "New Zealand Parliament Buildings" and modified on 23 July 2019 under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.