John Andrews: Architecture, a Performing Art

ARCHITECTURE
First Edition. 176 p. : ill. (some col.), plans ; 24 x 27 cm. #160223
John Hamilton Andrews AO was an Australian architect, known for designing a number of acclaimed structures in Australia, Canada and the United States. He was Australia’s first internationally recognised architect, and the 1980 RAIA Gold Medalist. He died peacefully in his hometown of Orange on 24 March 2022.
Few young architects have enjoyed a more sudden or dazzling launch onto the international stage than John Andrews, whose Scarborough College featured on the cover of Time magazine’s January 13, 1967 edition.
Topping the escarpment of a bleak snow-covered ravine, its brutalist succession of sculptural concrete sloping shapes were suggestive of a futurist medieval abbey out of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. International fame was instant for the 33-year-old.
Andrews’ outback experience created an instinctive understanding of climate and the effects of climate on architecture as it affects human behaviour. Prior to Scarborough, campuses consisted of individual pavilions. Andrews changed that. For the University of Toronto’s satellite college, each classroom and laboratory is linked by an internal all-weather enclosed heated street to facilitate protected student movement during the long harsh Canadian winter.
John Andrews was the first Australian to shoot to architectural prominence internationally. He consistently won design competitions for prestigious commissions against stiff competition. It is a measure of his intelligence, sheer force of personality and determination that he was so successful. No one else has bettered him before or since.
While he himself was very Australian, his architecture, even after his return, struggled to be Australian and continued to be international. This can be traced to Josep Lluis Sert at Harvard, who had worked for le Corbusier in Paris, and Louis Kahn’s influence. Harvard placed Andrews in the international mainstream and lifted him from out of Australian imitative dependence, making him one of Australia’s most innovative architects. Unlike Seidler, who arrived as a missionary of Bauhaus modernism whose modus was to adapt to Australian conditions, always insisting on the superiority of Europe and America over Australia, Andrews was his reverse, a truly Australian champion.

Firmly established internationally after 1966, Andrews went on to compete and win numerous prestigious projects: Miami Port passenger terminal, Gund Hall GSD at Harvard University, the 533-metre CN Tower in Toronto (until 2007 the tallest free-standing structure in the world) and Intelsat Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Andrews, John, 1933- | Buildings designed by Andrews, John, 1933- . Architectural features | Architecture — Canada — History — 20th century. | Architecture — Australia — History — 20th century.