A Visual Inventory

John Pawson is well known as a minimalist architect, whose body of work includes a new Cistercian monastery in Bohemia and Calvin Klein's first flagship store in New York. One key to his success is his remarkable sensibility: in a life spent almost constantly on the move, he is always looking for patterns, details, textures, spatial arrangements and coincidental moments that can inform his work as an architect and designer. Since acquiring a digital camera, Pawson has amassed over 200,000 snapshots. The anthology of nearly 300 images in this book has been carefully culled from this massive visual diary, and each picture is paired with an illuminating caption.

John Pawson was born in 1949 in Yorkshire. His work focuses on ways of approaching fundamental problems of space, proportion, light and materials – themes he also explored in his book Minimum, first published by Phaidon in 1996, which examines the notion of simplicity in art, architecture and design across a variety of historical and cultural contexts. His many residential and commercial interiors have included homes for the writer Bruce Chatwin and the opera director Pierre Audi as well as art galleries and stores in London, Dublin New York, Paris, Seoul and Tokyo. Subsequent projects have spanned a wide range of scales and building typologies, from stage sets and exhibitions to boats and airport lounges, and include such diverse projects as the new Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur in Bohemia and the Sackler Crossing, a bridge over the lake at Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens.