John Pawson, recovering simplicity
John Pawson, recovering simplicity
The face-to-face meeting with John Pawson at Milan’s cultural hub, Listone Giordano Arena, proved to be a pleasant moment of discovery. The architect, designer, photographer, author, poet of light and ‘father’ (not by choice) of minimalism, holds fast to his image as a true English gentleman, attentive and sensitive, the quintessence of simplicity as evoked by his latest publishing effort, a visual biography entitled ‘Making life simpler’. The English space maker – as he likes to call himself – embodies the very symbol of purity, order and balance; he has experienced the value of simplicity as a way of life, and not just as a design process.
An invitation to enter his life, dedicated to the pursuit of the most rigorous simplicity (synonymous with complexity) in all his works, while remaining true to himself, through no less than four decades in the profession. His skilfull renovations of historic buildings are rooted in a passion for detail and the rediscovered relationship between nature and architecture. In this interview, John Pawson offers a reflection consistent with the principles of his own well-established vision, drawing an ideal line between experience and spiritual bearing, thus giving voice to a personal contemporary expression.
John Pawson
John Pawson CBE has spent over thirty years making rigorously simple architecture that speaks of the fundamentals but is also modest in character. His body of work spans a broad range of scales and typologies, from private houses, sacred commissions, galleries, museums, hotels, ballet sets, yacht interiors and a bridge across a lake.
As Alvar Aalto’s bronze door handle has been characterised as the ‘handshake of a building’, so a sense of engaging with the essence of a philosophy of space through everything the eye sees or the hand touches is a defining aspect of Pawson’s work. His method is to approach buildings and design commissions in precisely the same manner, on the basis that ‘it’s all architecture’.
Whether at the scale of a monastery, a house, a saucepan or a ballet, everything is traceable back to a consistent set of preoccupations with mass, volume, surface, proportion, junction, geometry, repetition, light and ritual. In this way, even something as modest as a fork can become a vehicle for much broader ideas about how we live and what we value.
