John Pawson

For over 30 years, John Pawson CBE’s work – rigorous in its simplicity and modesty – has addressed the fundamentals of architecture. It spans a wide range of scales and typologies, from private residences, museums, and hotels, to ballet sets and sacred spaces.  Like Alvar Aalto’s bronze door handle – “the handshake of a building” – Pawson’s work engages with a philosophy of space through sight and touch. He applies the exact same approach to both buildings and design commissions: “it’s all architecture”.Regardless of scale, all of his projects share a consistent focus on mass, volume, surface, proportion, junction, geometry, repetition, light and ritual. In this way, even a modest fork becomes a vehicle for much broader ideas about how we live and what we value.