The Janus Attitude

Architect Brian Andrews mixes past and present to beautiful effect in his Midtown home.

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“I’ve lived everywhere,” says Brian Andrews. The University of Memphis architecture professor was born in Magnolia, Arkansas, but his horizons soon widened. His father’s work as a civil engineer took the family all over the world — first to New Orleans, then Beirut, Lebanon. “I learned to write my name in Arabic before I learned to write it in English,” he says.

He had his first glimpse of his future at age 9, while his family was living in Lagos, Nigeria. “My dad brought home these blueprints one day of what’s called a ‘jacket,’ which is a giant steel tower that sinks into the ocean, and they put a drilling rig on top of it, to get oil out of the earth,” he recalls. “I was just fascinated by the graphics of these blueprints. I asked Dad, ‘What job do you have to have where you get to deal with these things all day?’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s an architect.’”

After spending his high school years in Inverness, Scotland, Andrews returned to New Orleans to attend Tulane University, where, after a couple of false starts, he found a passion for the built environment. “I joined the architecture school and never looked back.”

Andrews is a believer in the importance of good architecture, and sees his mission as imparting these values to his students. “If you look at cities around the world — cities that are valued, that people want to live in — these cities all have architecture. Cities that do not have architecture suffer tremendously, because nobody cares.

He credits his mother for making sure he was exposed to art and culture during his nomadic upbringing. “One of the things that was amazing about growing up like that was that Mom was diligent about the fact that every time we crossed the ocean, we had to stop somewhere in Europe. So, by the time I was like 8 or 9 years old, I had been to Istanbul, Amsterdam, London, Rome, Athens, all of these amazing cities. And of course, she brought me to all of the architecture. I think it had a profound effect on me as a child, to then grow up and become an architect and to become a collector.”

Andrews worked in private practice in Boston before being accepted to the master’s program at Princeton. “I can draw really well,” he says. “This was in the mid- to late eighties, so there were no computers. I was an incredibly valuable asset to these firms because I could do these beautiful drawings that would sell the idea to the clients.”

After Princeton, he juggled practice and teaching for a while, but moved to academia full-time after an incident that still mystifies him. Andrews was hired by a wealthy Englishman to design a home on a private island in the Bahamas. “But then, when it was about 75 percent done, the client just disappeared, and we never heard from him again,” Andrews says. “I check on Google Earth every once in awhile, and the house is still there, but nothing’s happened to it. It’s just a shell.”

Since then, Andrews has taught at 16 different universities, including Clemson, the University of Southern California, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the University of Virginia, and the American University of Sharja in Dubai. He has published three books, most recently the massive Vervm Fictvm: Architectural Delineation and Speculation, 1984-2020, a 600-page monograph collecting his work.

Andrews is a believer in the importance of good architecture, and sees his mission as imparting these values to his students. “If you look at cities around the world — cities that are valued, that people want to live in — these cities all have architecture. Cities that do not have architecture suffer tremendously, because nobody cares .… Whenever you think of a city, whether it’s Rome, Paris, London, you immediately think of architecture. In Paris, it’s the Eiffel Tower, it’s Notre Dame. Rome is the Colosseum. That’s what gives these cities identity.”

A New Career in a New Town

Andrews was hired by the University of Memphis in the spring of 2020. “I moved to Memphis last July, and it was very difficult, moving here in the middle of the pandemic.”

He had one day to find a place to live, and feels he lucked into a 2,000-square-foot duplex in Midtown, a step up from the one-bedroom he lived in while teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. “I was so happy when I got this apartment, because I can finally get all my stuff out of storage and put it where I get to see it and enjoy it.”

Andrews is an avid antiquer whose urge to collect comes in waves. “My first phase was Piranesi,” he says.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a pioneering eighteenth-century Venetian artist, archeologist, and architect whose detailed depictions of Roman and Greek ruins sparked the neoclassical art movement. Andrews’ central hallway features several works by Piranesi.

“When I first moved here, they were actually all on exhibit at the museum at the University of Miami of Ohio,” he says. “It took about two months for that exhibit to come down. I had to drive to Ohio and bring them all back and then put them all up. … I love the archeological ones, because I think graphically they’re really interesting.”

The most striking etching is an exquisitely detailed depiction of Trajan’s Column in Rome, which stretches from floor to ceiling. A spiraling bas relief depicts the story of Emperor Trajan’s military victories; Piranesi’s illustration includes extensive notes describing the narrative and symbolism of the column.

Andrews collected Piranesi’s work until another obsession turned his head. “I was teaching in Syracuse, and there was this antique mall,” he recalls. “I went down there one day, and they had a bust of Diana. I was like — wow.”

Acquiring the Roman goddess of the hunt broke his bank account, but it was only the beginning. In Los Angeles, he found a bust of Cicero; in New Orleans, a helmeted Joan of Arc. Now, he shares his living space with Beethoven, Athena, Mercury, Poseidon, Apollo, Roman athletes, veiled Vestal virgins, Gavroche from Les Misérables, and best of all, a meticulous copy of Michelangelo’s David. “I love that statue, because when my daughter was little, it sat in this bay window in Los Angeles. She would crawl up to David, and that’s how she learned her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.”

Although Andrews is a talented artist in his own right, you won’t find his art on the walls of his apartment. “I just refuse to put my artwork up.”

But there are many paintings on display, including a seventeenth-century depiction by an unknown artist of the biblical story of the Massacre of the Innocents. Andrews found it in an antique store in Lexington, Kentucky, and negotiated with the owner for two years before finally agreeing on a price.

“I love that one,” he says, “because it’s also a portrayal of the ideal city, in that there were so many paintings during the Renaissance that tried to portray the ideal city, usually with the city hall in the center. It’s a great painting, in that it clearly shows foreground, middle ground, background.”

Mixed in with all the classicism is an eclectic collection of modernist objects. “I went through a fan phase,” Andrews says. “At one point, I owed about 40 of them, but then I started giving them away to students as graduation presents. Now, I only have ones that are either chrome or brass.”

He admits his collecting habit has frequently been expensive, but not all of his elegant objects cost money, such as the gray metal desk in the library. “Believe it or not, when I lived in Cincinnati, somebody threw this away!” he says. “I found it outside my apartment, lying on the ground. It was lemon yellow, so I painted it gray and painted the bottom black again.”

“There’s no formula, per se. A lot of it deals with how much money one has, the geography of where you are, what you can get ahold of.” — Brian Andrews

Making the mixture of eras and styles look natural can be tricky. “I love antique furniture, but I also love modern, like Eames,” he says. “The couch in the living room is a Le Corbusier, and so is the chaise longue. I love Breuer chairs. I think about how to combine historical and modern things, which is the way I do my architecture, too. I always start off my lectures with a bust of Janus, who was the two-faced god who looks to the past and the future at the same time. I call it the ‘Janus Attitude.’

“There’s no formula, per se,” Andrews continues. ”A lot of it deals with how much money one has, the geography of where you are, what you can get ahold of. The Mies [Van Der Rohe] and the [Marcel] Breuer furniture, like that’s all pretty standard, right? It’s going to work anywhere you put it. But when I was doing [the living] room, I made a conscious decision. We’re going to use all the modern furniture, but then all the other pieces are going to be these medical cabinets. So they’re all stainless steel, and then you can put wood on top of that. You actually have a theme going, and then you can work it. Whereas in the dining room, it’s all classical furniture.

“I don’t want to say taste,” he continues, “but it’s knowing when you have things that will work together. The fans will work with Empire furniture, because they have stronger lines. That would never work with Victorian, because there’s too much gobbledygook.”

Big Star Architecture

In his short time in Memphis, Andrews has been connecting with the local architectural scene and learning about the city’s cultural history. “There are some really good firms in Memphis who are doing good work, and you see it around Memphis. So I think the possibilities are endless.”

Soon after he moved to Memphis, a friend recommended the documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, about the world’s most famous underground band. “I didn’t know about Big Star before I moved here,” he says. “I loved it, because here were these four guys who were just nobody. They’re from Memphis, and they created music that was unbelievable — so far ahead of its time that’s it’s just mind blowing! So I like to think that, with architects in Memphis, isolation is what really produces culture. Those four guys, because they weren’t in L.A., they weren’t in New York, they were in Memphis. They were isolated, and that’s what allowed them to be so creative and inventive. As an architect, I think that’s what I’m trying to do as well.”