John Pawson
“For over thirty years, internationally-renowned architect John Pawson has developed countless examples of deceptively simple architecture that give rise to far wider ideas.”
Internationally-renowned British architect John Pawson is widely considered the father of minimalist architecture. We have worked with him a number of times since our first project together in 2009, the iconic House of Stone.
United by a passion for challenging conventional norms to create functional, beautiful design, we have together developed contemporary products for the home including the Ellipse homeware range and Span collection of indoor and outdoor furniture.
In 2021 he contributed to The Village, our special project that explores the concept of home, reinterpreting it in a collection of miniature houses in natural stone that are each a design accessory in their own right, but together represent the global village we inhabit today.
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.
