Artist, Architect, an inspirational and influential teacher, John Andrews studied and taught at the Architectural Association. He came to the AA from the Chelsea School of Art in 1974, and joined Bernard Tschumi’s Unit, and then Fred Scott and Robin Evans’ Unit from which he graduated with AA Diploma Honours. He was the founder, with Trish Pringle, of the London Summer School, which they taught at the AA in the summer of 1978. The outlines of the metanarrative of his architectural life can be seen in the programme of that summer school, which he later explored and refined in the Unit he taught with Robin Evans and Jonathan Wimpenny. Drawings, texts, films and objects were used to notate an intricate choreography of the life of the city, record its legends and rumours, and capture the way in which they are all experienced. Doorways, passages, halls, rooms and galleries were to be designed to provoke imagination and to construct reality.
John was Unit Master at the AA from 1980 to 1989, and had many other collaborators including Tony Fretton and Charlie Mann over those years. He had a way of bringing about unlikely conversations that featured friends and provocateurs including Dalibor Vesely, Gordon Pask, Warren Chalk and Robin Evans. He was a master of ephemera, in which he found hidden connections to the larger concerns of society. His own drawings and paintings were exquisite, elegant and evocative. He had an intuitive way of working, collecting the discarded ephemera of a culture, transposing them to new contexts and assembling new configurations and constructions, a highly individual inverse ‘cargo cult’ that reflected upon social relationships with spaces, material objects and technology. It was his view that the work of the architect is to create spatial artefacts that cannot be apprehended from afar, but experienced from the inside, memories of experience embodied in constructed narratives that conjure new realities.
He taught and lectured all across the world; Cornell, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia, Texas and Mexico City and in Australia where he became Professor of Interior Design at RMIT Australia where he made a significant contribution and is remembered with great affection. He taught and inspired so many and in so many places, and was always generous with his time and attention. He certainly was an indefatigable traveller, but he was quintessentially a Londoner, and he knew its nervous system better than his own. And most particularly, he was part of the AA from the day he arrived in September 1974 until his death in February 2019.
He was my tutor for one amazing year. I went with him on a long trip around Mexico, and under his guidance made strange paintings and objects, and discovered the surrealist architect Edward James, and endlessly reread the William Burroughs trilogy of Cities of the Red Night. On the night train to Veracruz we talked of Burroughs’ 1000 imaginary cities of the Gobi desert and the magical realism of Borges and The Garden of Forking Paths. I can see him now, elegantly dressed and lazily strolling at dawn, a smile on his face, through the broken crockery on the streets of Oaxaca after the crazy Night of the Radishes festival.
He was an extraordinary man, a traveller of the roads less trodden, a master of hidden connections, a conjurer and provocateur of the imagination, an inspiration. Like so many others who worked or studied with John, whose lives were touched and changed by that encounter, I count my life richer for having known him. I never knew anyone more present in the moment, nor more filled with madness at the joy of being alive.
Michael Weinstock
February 24th, 2019
There will be an event at the Architectural Association remembering John Andrews on Saturday 16 March - the event is open to anyone who knew him. Find out more
His drawings, exhibitions, installations, designs and publications are archived here: https://www.johnandrews.london