John Andrews: Architect of Uncommon Sense edited by Paul Walker. Harvard Design Press, 506 pp., $78.
The February 1970 issue of Architectural Record devoted fifteen pages to analyzing “four buildings or additions to cities” by the Australian Canadian architect John Andrews. The awkward phrasing was fitting: two of the projects were educational buildings–Gund Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Sarah Lawrence College’s Library-Instructional Center–and two planned large urban zones–Toronto’s 200-acre Metro Centre and Belconnen, a satellite city on the edge of Canberra. The Record feature marked a career peak for Andrews, who died in 2022. But it also correctly identified the two preoccupations of his design practice: large buildings for universities and other institutions and urban plans for new districts or towns. Andrews and contemporary critics saw academic campuses as potential models for new cities and essential elements of a new society, what Joseph Rykwert called “universities as institutional archetypes of our age.”
Architect of Uncommon Sense explores Andrews’s remarkable body of work in Canada, Australia, and the US while placing the man firmly in his time as a member of the “third generation” of modern architects. It is that rarest of things: a large-format, lavishly illustrated architectural monograph that is worth reading from cover to cover. Exposition isn’t confined to the edges of glossy photographs, as is usually the case. Instead, editor Paul Walker and five contributing authors tease out the complexities that accompanied Andrews’s design commissions, large and small. What appear at first glance to be willful expressions of form are revealed to be, at least in part, the outcome of rigorous programmatic analysis.
Andrews was a product of the postwar expansion in higher education that would also shape his career. Born to a working-class family in Sydney in 1933, he worked as a “bush builder” in between classes at the University of Sydney, where he majored in architecture. His humble beginnings became part of the common sense that Andrews often claimed extended from himself to his buildings. He won a scholarship to study at the Harvard GSD, then moved to Toronto, where he eventually founded a design firm.
Continuing a trajectory that would be nearly impossible for today’s young practitioners to follow, Andrews landed his big break before he turned thirty. He was tasked with leading the master plan for Scarborough College, a new University of Toronto campus—a process he described as “some young guy screwing around with a master plan.” This master plan was so successful, however, that he was then made responsible for its architecture. His solution was a megastructure, though Andrews wouldn’t have been familiar with the term at the time: two massive wings of raw concrete, one housing the humanities and one the sciences, each arranged around a long corridor and meeting in a central hall. The humanities wing stepped out as it rose even as the science wing stepped in, producing a compelling tension in the composition of the 400,000-square-foot building.
Scarborough’s corridors were conceived as indoor streets, so as to encourage casual encounters and bring urban scale to the exurban site. The campus attracted international attention, and Andrews came to be closely associated with Canada’s budding architectural vanguard. It also prepared Andrews’s office for other educational commissions such as Gund Hall. Like Scarborough, Gund Hall was designed to facilitate impromptu discourse and social congregation—in this case among faculty, staff, and students of the GSD’s various disciplines, which had previously been dispersed across Harvard’s campus. And as at Scarborough, programmatic demands concretized into an indelible image, with a quasi-Brutalist front giving way to a sloping glass roof at the rear; beneath the canted roof, floor “trays” containing open design studios were staggered to create a greenhouse-like environment humming with activity. In moments—especially in less-privileged spaces such as the lecture halls—function is strenuously subordinated to form. Still, Gund Hall has stood up to extensive adaptation over the years, whether by shifts in program distribution or by student modifications.
By the time Gund Hall was completed in 1972, Andrews had moved back to Australia to design the Cameron Offices, which housed 4,000 government employees, making it the largest office building in the country. It was also the first building in the center of Belconnen, a new satellite town outside Canberra. Where Scarborough’s enclosed linear street brought a sense of urbanity to a rural setting, Cameron’s open-air mall acted as an urban microcosm. The mall connected seven “fingers” of offices that alternated with courtyard gardens designed with plants from Australia’s varied ecosystems. At the Cameron Offices, concrete formed a light, elegant frame for the many transitions from interior to exterior that were meant to break the monotony of clerical work.
Andrews designed a number of other significant projects in Australia, including King George Tower in Sydney, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Student Union and Library, and the Sydney Convention Center. But, starting in the 1980s, he became disillusioned with the state’s retreat from creating new institutions and the ambitious buildings that housed them. Neoliberalism had sharply reduced the “big” projects on which Andrews had spent his professional life. After the Veterinary Science Complex at Sydney University opened in 1995, John Andrews International closed down. Though Andrews continued to do small projects for friends and family members, he devoted much of his time to pursuits like winemaking and fishing.
Andrews had deep faith in what he called the “undeniable bloody logic” of his designs. Accepting the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in 1980, he said of Australian architecture, “We don’t need the catchphrases from New York. We don’t need the grays and whites or the ‘isms.’ What we need to do is our own architecture and believe in ourselves.”
Not many architects would have relinquished their hold on history quite so gracefully. The individual case studies in Architect of Uncommon Sense go out of their way to establish Andrews as a generational talent, on par with Kahn, Stirling, or Josep Lluís Sert. By contrast, the book’s most interesting chapters deal with a broader theme—“Urban Projects,” “Towers”—that, despite their generic titles, serve as effective rubrics for examining Andrews’s buildings. These sections identify the intellectual currents and institutional structures that cut across Andrews’s portfolio, upping the ante of the architectural monograph.
Walker’s editorial prerogatives cycle between critical reappraisal and gentle revisionism. One significant aspect of this appraisal is to situate Andrews as an (proto-) environmental architect. In this way, the book doubles as a catalog of ingenious strategies for sun exposure and heating requirements. For instance, at African Place for Expo 67 in Montreal, sculptural openings in the roof passively cooled the building; later projects employed green roofs and external sun shields. Far removed from the ecological discourses popularized by Sim van der Ryn or Buckminster Fuller, Andrews saw sustainability as part of his overall ethic of practical problem-solving. To implement his solutions, he relied on a network of trusted collaborators, such as landscape architect Richard Strong, who designed the courtyards at the Cameron Offices.
Elsewhere, Walker addresses a frequently understudied part of architecture: the public-facing work of sitting on committees and competition juries. Andrews served as a juror for the Australian Parliament House competition that selected Romaldo Giurgola’s soaring design and chaired the competition for The Peak in Hong Kong that was won by a young Zaha Hadid. From 1977 to 1988, he was also a member of the Australia Council, which exerted a strong influence on the country’s position toward the arts. Walker convincingly argues that this activity, which involved organizing exchanges of architects with China and the US, curating exhibitions, publishing books, and supporting architectural education in secondary schools, was essential in fostering a specifically Australian architecture.
The concluding photo essay is beautiful but poignant. As photographer Noritaka Minami explains, most architectural photography takes place shortly after completion. His photographs, by contrast, document “what becomes of a building after the years have passed.” Much of Andrews’s work has suffered demolition and unsympathetic changes. The majority of the Cameron Offices was demolished in 2006, leaving the remainder stranded in a bleak setting of cheap apartment complexes and parking lots. Sydney Convention Centre was demolished in 2014. Part of the authors’ mission is to inspire institutions to preserve or restore Andrews’s surviving buildings, such as the University of Western Ontario’s D. B. Weldon Library, housing at the University of Canberra and the nearby Callam Offices, and the Intelsat headquarters in Washington, DC. (In Minami’s frank coda, these projects appear by turns haggard and eminently used.)
Andrews had deep faith in what he called the “undeniable bloody logic” of his designs. Accepting the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal in 1980, he said of Australian architecture, “We don’t need the catchphrases from New York. We don’t need the grays and whites or the ‘isms.’ What we need to do is our own architecture and believe in ourselves.” The same could be said of his own body of work, yet he also kept up with international trends, what he called “know[ing] something about the things I want to know about.” (One wishes that more of Andrews’s voice made it into the book, as the few quotes there are from him—like when he (probably) refers to Robert Venturi as “that bloke in Philadelphia with the eyebrows”—show his charisma and sense of humor.) His buildings for large institutions solved programmatic challenges and pointed the way toward a flexible, interconnected society. But many were also memorable in the manner—sometimes exaggerated, always bold—through which they expressed function: the great trays and glass roof of Gund Hall, the long indoor streets of Scarborough, the avian swoops of the Miami Sea Terminal roof. In 1965, Reyner Banham wrote that “it is no use cyberneticists and Organization and Research men telling us that a computerized city might look like anything and nothing: most of us want it to look like something; we don’t want form to follow function into oblivion.” Working during the complex social, institutional, and technological changes of the late twentieth century, Andrews was, despite his avowed pragmatism, one of the most brilliant manipulators of form. In the end, this “uncommon sense” is why his work remains so relevant and why this excellent book is so welcome.