Wednesday 1 Dec

>>Gordon Andrews: a design original<<

Remember the last time you clutched a wad of crisp $50 bills in your
hot little hands? Me neither.

Even if you did, you could be forgiven for not realising you were
actually grasping the handiwork of Australia’s most talented and
influential postwar designer — Gordon Andrews.

Though these days he spends most of his time working on more
whimsical projects, it would be a travesty if this surprisingly little
known fact were to be lost along with his family of paper notes that
are gradually being taken out of circulation. With the recent
appearance of a major publication and retrospective, “Gordon
Andrews: a designers life”, that seems unlikely to happen.

Both book and exhibition are themselves excellent examples of
Andrews’ ability to control the arrangement of shape, space and form
in a wide variety of situations. Together they provide an extraordinary
visual journey which traces the remarkable career of one of our most
versatile design originals.

Over his sixty year career as a designer of graphics, furniture,
interiors, photography, and sculpture, Andrews (b 1914) has faced
more than his share of challenges. His designs for the first decimal
currency notes certainly didn’t please everyone when they first
appeared in 1966. They were a bold transformation of old sterling
reserve into vigorous contemporary form. Trying to pull Australians
beyond the unsophisticated meat-and-potatoes approach to graphic
design that prevailed during the fifties and sixties was no easy task.

Andrews tells a quintessential anecdote about just how low the level
of visual literacy actually was. During a trip to the 1937 Paris
International Fair Andrews encountered some of the most exciting,
dare I say revolutionary, ideas that were shaping the culture of the
machine-age. There he saw beautiful furniture and fabrics made in
Poland, Picasso’s provocative “Guernica” in the Spanish Pavilion,
and abstract kinetic mobiles by Alexander Calder. Elsewhere he
encountered a pile of tinned fruit and jams surrounded by a small
herd of stuffed koala bears and wallabies. The ‘pavilion’ was as
Andrews remembers it a “box with letters spelling AUSTRALIA like a
row of birds perched on the top of the front wall.”

The design and construction of displays for international trade fairs
and biennales has come a long way since then, the present Venice
Biennale pavilion notwithstanding. Andrews even got the opportunity
to wreak his revenge on kitsch nonsense in 1960 when the
Department of Trade commissioned him to design the government
pavilion for a large international fair in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The first in a series of sophisticated and logical exhibition spaces that
Andrews conceived throughout the course of his career, the pavilion
presented a confident and distinctive industrial image of Australia to
an inquisitive world audience. The pavilion’s copper-clad wall
displayed rolled steel girders, aluminium extrusions, and lightboxes
depicting scenes from steel mills.

A large and fully functional Rolls Royce jet engine that sat on a
specially made cradle in the middle of the exhibition space
heightened the industrial allusions. It was an impressive
demonstration of Andrews’ ability to create a design that could lead a
visitor through the didactic space of the pavilion.

Andrews’ pragmatic philosophy of design is still pertinent. Question:
“What are we designers trying to do in the long run?” Answer: “One’s
priority should always be to make a good product, whether it’s a
washing machine, a poster or the interior of a building.”

That might not quite have been what NSW Govt Tourist Bureau
employees immediately thought when they saw his new Martin Place
interior, also built during the 1960s. Its cloudlike hanging ceiling,
unconventional floor mosaic and minimal sculptural fixtures and
furnishing were just “too modern” for some.

The sparse clean lines and skeletal desks caused one long-serving
staff member to enquire when the modesty panels were going to be
fitted to the front! Although keen to create a comfortable and
aesthetically pleasing working space for staff Andrews refuses to hide
his impatience at it all: “In my view, when members of staff insist on
conditions which allow them to change into their slippers for the day,
it’s time for them to take a job in the back room.”

Not that Andrews is insensitive to the demands of clients. The
success of the design is always paramount. “If the product is more
efficient, more comfortable, more visually attractive and handles
better than its competitor, it will be appreciated, attain high value, and
sell well.”

If that message is finally starting to get through to Australian
entrepreneurs and business people, then it’s bound to have been in
some small way due to the maverick efforts of Gordon Andrews.

(A Gordon Andrews retrospective, curated by Judith O’Callaghan, is
on exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney till ???? 94;
“Gordon Andrews: a designer’s life”, New South Wales University
Press)