John Pawson: A personal thing

Abstract

John Pawson was brought up in Yorkshire, the son of a mill-owner, and was sent to school at Eton, where he insisted on sleeping in a white canvas hammock. It was an early sign of his interest in the ascetic. After seven years in the family textile business, he travelled to Japan and then studied briefly at the Architectural Association before setting up his own design practice in London. He is celebrated as a Minimalist but, as Deyan Sudjic points out in one of the essays in Themes and Projects, the latest book on Pawson's work, it ‘has a robustness that allows it to transcend the trivialization of the label’. His buildings have a considerable physical and sensory presence, an abundance of experiential things. In another essay, one of the neighbours of Pawson's London house, Katherine Bucknall, describes the effect as ‘maximal, supercharged, eerie, occasionally mystical’. And it is easy to empathize with her observation that even a pink rubber glove lying on the kitchen floor takes on a surreal quality, ‘like a piece of contemporary art … a human clue in a plain, geometric ground’. These sorts of realities are not easily reducible to words or images and so, when I met John Pawson in his London office (and after he'd helped me fix my tape-recorder), that's where we began.