John Pawson CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to Design and Architecture) has spent over thirty years making rigorously simple architecture that speaks of the fundamentals but is also modest in character. Alvar Aalto’s bronze door handle has been described as the ‘handshake of a building’. Similarly, Pawson’s own work engages with the essence and philosophy of space through everything the eye sees or the hand touches. 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—architecture. 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.
