Vale

Paul Walker pays tribute to the extraordinary life and career of John Andrews, a late modernist architect whose work made an impact across three countries.

He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1981, “in recognition of service to architecture.” But Andrews had many interests other than his architectural practice. This mall was supposed to be connected to housing further to the east, and – most importantly to the logic of the scheme – a rapid transit node and a town centre to the immediate north. Andrews won many accolades across his career, notably the Gold Medal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1980. In Australia, Andrews continued to undertake university projects: Toad Hall at the Australian National University and residences at the Canberra College of Advanced Education are significant examples. As he had at Scarborough, Andrews introduced an urban order in each of these projects, or further elaborated urban opportunities latent in the context. Partly realized as a college of technical and further education five years later, only three of the proposed 24 octagonal pods were built. In 1962, he was appointed with two colleagues – planner Michael Hugo-Brunt and landscape architect Michael Hough – to conceive a plan for a new satellite campus of the university at Scarborough in Toronto’s eastern suburbs. In 1968, John Overall of the National Capital Development Commission offered Andrews the design of Cameron Offices in Belconnen, a new satellite of Canberra. Seizing the opportunity to return to Australia, he relocated his family (he and Ro had four sons) from Toronto and set up an office in Palm Beach in Sydney’s north. In 1961, Andrews left Parkin to tour Europe, the Middle East and India, particularly visiting the post-war work of Le Corbusier, including the under-construction buildings at Chandigarh. After a brief interlude back in Sydney working with Peter Stephenson of Stephenson and Turner, he returned to Toronto, where he started teaching at the University of Toronto’s school of architecture. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, institutional projects dried up as the neoliberal ethos of “small government” took hold in Canberra, and Andrews increasingly looked to commercial projects. Andrews devised a single building to house 5,000 students in arts and sciences in an inflected linear form, with an internal “street” following the top of a wooded ravine. He also contributed to the structural resolution of the winning City Hall design by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, who worked with Parkin to realize his project.