The Look of Science

The most illuminating moment in historian Paul Walker’s lecture on the Australian architect John Andrews at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design came during an aside on the latter’s farmhouse in New South Wales. It’s a simple pavilion with an odd, hi-tech accoutrement—a steel-frame tower—that irrupts out of a modest gable roof. Walker, who has edited a new monograph on Andrews, called everyone’s attention to the tower, which “appears to be waiting for some technological invention, perhaps some wind turbine, to give justification for its design.” He also noted how Andrews, an architect deeply concerned with the performance of his buildings, was reluctant to elaborate on their designs, insisting they were just “common sense.” The question remains, Walker remarked, as to whether “science was subordinated to science’s look”—a question as relevant for today’s environmentalism as to that of a half-century ago. The talk coincided with the opening of an exhibition Walker co-curated with architect Kevin Liu, and fittingly staged in Andrews’s Gund Hall. Featuring newly commissi…