ABSTRACT
Introduction The architecture of John Andrews in Canada, the United States and Australia has often been characterised as “brutalist” or some variant, such as “Brutalist” or “New Brutalist”. It is also described in related ways, as “raw”, “tough”, “robust” or “brutal”. Or it is linked to figures directly or indirectly connected to Brutalism – the Smithsons, Stirling, Kahn, Rudolph, Lasdun and late Le Corbusier. Such usages are found in discussions of his projects when they were being built and when his career was at the height of its international profile, but also more recently, as the architecture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is reassessed. This is the case not least because it is increasingly under pressure of redevelopment and even demolition, as recently occurred with his most significant project in his hometown, the Sydney Convention Centre (Fig 1). Some instances of this are as follows: Philip Drew describes Scarborough College – Andrews’ breakthrough project in independent practice, completed in 1965 – as embodying “a number of Brutalist ideals” and, indeed, as “brutally frank” at a time “when English Brutalism was losing its nerve” (1972); Jennifer Taylor – the most important commentator on Andrews at the height of his career – describes Scarborough first as “raw and Fabrications, 2015 Vol. 25, No. 2, 214-233, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2015.1032480 2015 The Journal of the Society of Architectural Australia and New Zealand
unstudied” (1982), then as “raw but intellectual” (1986) and finally in 2012 as “strongly expressive of the Brutalist ethic”.1 She sees Scarborough as an important precursor for the Cameron Offices – the vast project for the Canberra bureaucracy that brought Andrews back to Australia in 1969, which she also describes as having “roots in Brutalism and ultimately in Corbusier’s concrete architecture”.2 Notwithstanding Taylor’s recognition of “Brutalist” tendencies in the work, it is significant that the term “Brutalist” was never used in descriptions of Andrews’ architecture in Architecture: A Performing Art (1982) – the book on Andrews’ practice that she co-authored with the architect himself. North American writers, as well as Australians, locate Andrews firmly in relation to “Brutalism” and its variants. Sometimes this has been a connection made to disparage the architect’s work. On completion of the Andrews-designed George Gund Hall for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1972, Wolf von Eckhardt – one of the period’s most powerful American architectural critics – accused it of “brutally ostentatious simplicity”, claiming in his harshly dismissive article on the building that Andrews was directly influenced in his Gund design by the work of the leaders of British “Brutalism”, Peter and Alison Smithson.3 In 2013, however, the inclusion of Gund Hall as one of twenty-two “Brutalist Architecture Schools of the US” in the Brutalism-themed issue of the journal CLOG, published in February that same year, was certainly intended to ascribe to the building a certain degree of retrospective “cool”. Recent Canadian writing – on the architecture of what is often characterised as the country’s postwar cultural awakening – has similar intent, with Scarborough’s apparent Brutalist credentials recalled almost nostalgically: Margaret and Phil Goodfellow’s 2010 A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto notes that Scarborough “became an architectural landmark of the ‘New Brutalism’ style that influenced the development of many iconic university buildings”; while Paolo Scrivano comments in a piece titled “Scarborough College’s Brutalist Dreams” that Scarborough “openly referred to models and paradigms – specifically Brutalism and mega-structural urbanism – that were widely debated by the international architectural discourse of the 1960s”.4 Re´jean Legault, meanwhile, has recently employed writing on Scarborough as a key case in tracing how the use of the term “Brutalist” in relation to Canadian architecture is complex and changeful, just as “Brutalist” and “New Brutalist” evade any precision more broadly.5
