Fot.: John Pawson

The Simple Expression of Complex Thought

by John Pawson

Text published in El Croquis - John Pawson. Omnibus Volume

I am always perplexed when people look at my house and say that they think it is very beautiful but how can I live like that. To me the thinking is all the wrong way round. The whole point is that this is how we live, so this is what our house needs to be like. The architecture is the physical expression of a way of being: the form does not follow a particular fashion, it follows a particular life. The life my sort of architecture follows is not one which feels right for everybody. I am passionate about my work, but I am not out to make converts. The only universal measure is whether space feels comfortable and right to the people who use it. Minimalism &mdashor, as Donald Judd preferred to put it, the simple expression of complex thought&mdash is but one valid response of an aesthetically diverse society, answering the needs of particular individuals and provoking debate in society at large about how we choose to live and how we expect architecture to support these choices.

I think we have to get away from the idea of minimalism as a style and instead understand it as a way of thinking about space&mdash its proportions, surfaces and the fall of light. The vision is comprehensive and seamless, a quality of space rather than forms, places not things. This is why, in its fullest and most satisfying expression, it is not something which you can readily acquire a piece of. A perfect hemispherical basin carved out of a solid block of Carrara marble may be an exquisite object, but in isolation it is no more than that: a beautiful basin. It is the totality of the environment of which it is a part which signifies. "Minimum is maximum in drag", writes Rem Koolhaas: a consciously inflammatory comment, but all too true, I think, where simplicity is crudely translated into a decorative effect. Drag implies spectacle. There is of course a place for theatre, but for architecture of this type, theatre is not the principle on which everything else is hung.

I think it is important, too, to understand that minimalism is not a manifesto for living spartanly. This is a recurrent misunderstanding which springs in part from its association with movements where renunciation of one sort or another is a central theme&mdash it is unusual for a discussion of architectural simplicity not to include some reference to Zen Buddhism, the Cistercian Order or the Shakers. One may respond to the aesthetic expressions and indeed share many of the needs which these movements have sought to address without adopting particular codes of behaviour: one can want a place where it is possible to be still, without necessarily wanting to pray in it.

Minimalism is not an architecture of self-denial, deprivation or absence: it is defined not by what is not there, but by the rightness of what is and the richness with which this is experienced. I have been accused of practising a kind of inverted luxury, but what could be more sensuous or tactile than an expanse of honey-coloured limestone? This is definitively not about creating the architectural equivalent of the hair shirt, but about making the best possible contexts for the things which matter in life, on paring back the accretions of surface and behaviour to what is essential: the glory lies not in the act of removal, but in the experience of what is left. Profound &mdashand pleasurable&mdash experience is located in ordinary experience: in the taking of a shower or the preparation of food.

People tend to focus on the idea of the removal, that it is all somehow a case of throwing out the furniture and painting the walls white. The serious thought which underlies the endeavour is missed. Real comfort is not about a large sofa&mdash in my view, many things which look as though they should be comfortable aren’t at all. For me comfort is synonymous with a state of total clarity where the eye, the mind and the physical body are at ease, where nothing jars or distracts. This emphasis on a quality of experience is important. Some people seem to have an idea that the only role the individual has in such spaces is the capacity to contaminate. In the sort of work which interests me, the antithesis is true: the individual is always at its heart.

We are living through a period of rapid change, which we fuel with our hunger for the latest new thing. Novelty as an end in itself is over-rated. Instead of pleasure in its profounder forms, we chase distraction. We are preoccupied by ideas of the future when what we are really trying to do is make the present feel new and engaging. In architecture this translates into rolling programmes of refurbishment. We change everything and nothing. If our interest in the future is really the desire for a present which satisfies us &mdashphysically, visually and psychologically&mdash can we develop perpetually interesting forms which exist outside the forces of time and fashion? This, I believe, is what the aesthetic of simplicity, with its vast and paradoxical potential for richness and sensuality, offers. Perhaps I am an evangelist after all.