INTERNATIONAL STAR: John Andrews at home in Orange. Photo: STEVE GOSCH 1018sgarchitect2
UNIQUE BUILDING: Callam Offices in Woden.
DESIGNING offices for 5000 public servants beyond the reach of treacherous floodwaters at Woden, Orange resident and architect John Andrews’ response was ambitious but too daring for the government who commissioned his work.
Seven people were swept to their deaths during flash-flooding in a concrete-lined creek skirting the town centre in January 1971.
Mr Andrews said after that disaster, the National Capital Development Commission wanted a safe solution for new offices, which led to his unique Callam Offices design.
“The total logic was how to use valuable land, right next to a shopping centre,’’ Mr Andrews said.
“Each one of the units is on four points, it is hung on four points, or four columns, to have an absolute minimum structure in the path of the water flow. There was to be no accommodation at all at ground level.’’
About the same time he designed what he rates an even better building, Belconnen’s Cameron Offices.
One of Australia’s most significant architects, an international star of late modernism according to his peers, the 78-year-old joined international critics and scholars last weekend at the two-day John Andrews symposium in Melbourne.
An organiser of the symposium, deputy dean of architecture, building and planning at Melbourne University, professor Paul Walker, said a three-year research project was looking at Mr Andrews’ work in Australia, Canada and North America.
“For a long time I thought he was somewhat disregarded and the achievement of his work in Australia and North America is really very significant. It’s time to look back at it,’’ Professor Walker said.
“Work of that [Callam and Cameron offices] period generally is underestimated and so I think generally academics are starting to show more interest.’’
Mr Andrews does not hide his contempt for the Commonwealth for scaling back his Woden building, which 430 staff occupy today.
“I mean, they only built three of the bloody things [raised office pods] and turned it into a TAFE. It was going to be a major office complex.
“I did a thing called the Cameron Offices, which the stupid bastards have half pulled down.
“Now that is one of the travesties of all time.”
The International Union of Architects’ lists Cameron Offices on its register of significant 20th Century Australian architecture.
In 1980 Mr Andrews won the Australian Institute of Architects’ gold medal, the profession’s highest accolade. In the same year his design of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat) in Washington won the International Union of Architects’ international competition.
The partial demolition of the Cameron Offices saddens professor Walker, although he’s pleased remnants are still in use, and Callam Offices remain intact.
He said buildings today did not have the robust quality of Mr Andrews’ work, which made places feel quite humane.
“You feel [his] buildings are going to house people for a long time, you feel part of a community in them,’’ Professor Walker said.
Living in Orange and confined to a wheelchair after diabetes caused him to lose a leg, Mr Andrews thinks governments’ desire for new buildings in Canberra at the expense of old ones is short-sighted.
“I can’t say that there’s a great degree of knowledge or respect for any artform in Australia, particularly architecture,’’ he said.