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Photo: Bjankuloski06 · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Town hall in Warkworth, New Zealand
Warkworth Town Hall is the only extant civic building constructed from glazed hollow ceramic blocks. In 1910 the Warkworth Town Board hired architect Arthur Bibra Herrold to design a town hall and the tender was won by Thomas Edwin Clark, who used a novel glazed hollow ceramic block containing a vertical divider in the construction. Clark's blocks were not widely adopted and by 1914 stopped production: making the Warkworth Town Hall a rare example of the construction technique. The town hall became the centre of the town and regularly hosted social events. The growth of the Warkworth led to a desire to expand the town hall and in 1937 an Art Deco extension was added onto the building. Later extensions in the 1960s and 1970s unfavourably added onto the building and in the 2010s a modern annexe was added onto the building. Due to the rare construction technique and the strong tie between the town hall and the settlement it is registered as a category 1 building with Heritage New Zealand.
