Latest / Soft Ratios Research / Nothing left to take away (on John Pawson)

Transcript

Nothing left to take away (on John Pawson) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which works better with a reply. [pause] If this is interesting, write a review with your thoughts.
• 0:31
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, John Pawson.
• 0:38
  Ground: You walk into one of these rooms. White walls, a floor of pale stone, light coming from somewhere you can't quite place. No sofa. A bench. And the first thing you think — before you think anything generous — is: I could do this. Clear the clutter, paint it white, throw out half the furniture. Done.
• 1:00
  Figure: That's the standard read on John Pawson. Born in Halifax, 1949, into a Yorkshire textile family, sent to Eton, and for more than forty years the man they call the king of minimalism. Which is a title he can't stand. He calls the word itself a dangerous area. He'd rather you said plain space.
• 1:20
  Ground: Dangerous how?
• 1:22
  Figure: Because it turns a discipline into a decorating scheme. His line is there's a prevailing misconception that minimalism is a style rather than a philosophy of space — that it's just a matter of getting rid of furniture and painting the walls white. And once it's a style, anyone can claim it, and most of what claims it is thin.
• 1:40
  Ground: So the thought you have walking in — I could do this — that's the exact misunderstanding he's spent a life arguing with.
• 1:48
  Figure: And here's the definition he argues from. He says the minimum is the perfection an artifact reaches when it's no longer possible to improve it by subtraction. Every component, every junction, reduced to the essential. Not less for the look of less. Less until one more cut would break it.
• 2:08
  Ground: Sit with that though. Nothing left to take away. We say it like it's humble. Modest. The empty room as a kind of restraint. [pause] But a limit isn't modest. A limit is the hardest place on earth to reach. Think of the last thing you owned that felt truly finished — where you couldn't add or remove a single piece without wrecking it. You almost never get there. Not with a room, not with a sentence, not with a day. [pause] Most things stay cluttered because getting to the minimum is exhausting, and we stop early. So when he says the minimum, he isn't describing a look at all. He's describing an ending most people never reach.
• 2:54
  Figure: And that's the first crack in the easy story. Because if the minimum is an ending you rarely reach, the white room isn't the starting point you land on by clearing out. It's the finish line of an enormous amount of work you can't see. [pause] So where does the instinct come from. The myth says Japan. And Japan's in it — we'll get there. But his own account puts the source earlier, and closer to home. Yorkshire.
• 3:21
  Ground: The textile heir.
• 3:22
  Figure: The West Yorkshire moors. Treeless landscapes, industrial mill buildings. Methodist parents on both sides who prized simplicity and modesty. And as a child, visits to the ruined Cistercian abbeys — Fountains, Rievaulx. He says he was already formed by all of that before he ever heard of anyone in Tokyo.
• 3:42
  Ground: Ruined abbeys. So the first minimalism he ever saw was — literally — buildings with the roofs gone. Stripped by time, not by anyone's design.
• 3:55
  Figure: Stripped by design first, then by time. That's the part worth knowing. The Cistercians didn't drift into austerity. They legislated it. Around 1125 Bernard of Clairvaux wrote an attack on lavish church decoration — gold, silver, jewels, carved cloister capitals. He mocked the carvings as a shapely misshapenness, said the monks ended up reading the marble instead of the books. That attack expressed an ethic the order also enforced through statutes: no stone bell-towers, no wall paintings, manuscript initials held to a single color, windows of clear glass — the phrase is without either cross or color.
• 4:38
  Ground: Nearly nine hundred years before he laminates slices of onyx over a church window in Augsburg to soften the light. The same argument, running underground the whole time.
• 4:50
  Figure: Ornament as a distraction from prayer. Get rid of the thing standing between you and the light.
• 4:57
  Ground: And a boy from a Methodist family, raised in an antique-filled house he privately reacted against, wandering around Fountains — he's not learning a style there. He's absorbing an argument he doesn't have words for yet. That the bareness is the point. That the stone and the light are enough.
• 5:17
  Figure: Then Japan hands him the words. 1973. He's twenty-four, walks out of the family business —
• 5:25
  Ground: After watching a documentary about Zen monks doing kendo in exquisite buildings, and deciding, on that basis, to go and become a monk himself.
• 5:34
  Figure: Which lasted one night. They dropped him at Eihei-ji temple in Fukui, on Christmas Eve. By the next morning he knew it wasn't his life. His own line: ten years, twenty years, a lifetime — it became a few hours. His friend had waited outside to drive him home.
• 5:53
  Ground: I love that the friend waited. Somebody already knew how it would go.
• 5:58
  Figure: And then the real apprenticeship. He'd seen the work of a Japanese designer, Shiro Kuramata, in a magazine as a teenager — said that other than Mies van der Rohe, Kuramata was the first designer whose work made sense to him. [pause] In Tokyo he finds Kuramata's phone number, writes it inside the front of a book, and cold-calls the most famous designer in Japan. How do you do. I'm John Pawson. Can we have a coffee.
• 6:22
  Ground: Twenty-four. No standing, no reason for a yes. And it works.
• 6:28
  Figure: It works. He's never formally employed — he just spends as much time in Kuramata's company as he can. Sushi bars, the spaces Kuramata built. And what he takes isn't a style either. It's discipline. And a phrase — no sparks, no sparks — meaning keep working the thing until it ignites. He later called Japan a very refined and sexy version of Halifax.
• 6:54
  Ground: Which gives away the whole thing, doesn't it. He didn't discover minimalism in Kyoto. He found a more refined version of what the moors had already given him. Japan didn't form him. It translated him.
• 7:08
  Figure: There's one more source for the famous definition, and it's the one people miss. Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to take away. Everyone hangs that on design, on Pawson, on minimalism generally. [pause] It comes from a French pilot's memoir. 1939. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes.
• 7:32
  Ground: The Little Prince man.
• 7:34
  Figure: The same. And in that passage he isn't talking about rooms or objects at all. He's describing aircraft. How generations of engineers refine an airplane — polishing, lightening, paring the curve of a fuselage — until the machine disappears behind its function. He says the plane isn't a goal, it's a tool, and the perfected machine ends up as elemental as a pebble polished by the sea.
• 8:00
  Ground: So the founding sentence of architectural minimalism was written about a wing.
• 8:05
  Figure: About engineering. Which changes what it means. It isn't empty is beautiful. It's the form is finished when nothing left in it is arbitrary. A wing that's been pared down isn't bare for effect — every gram that went was dead weight. That's a functional test, not an aesthetic one.
• 8:24
  Ground: And there's the sleight of hand in the whole word. We hear nothing left to take away and we picture emptiness. He means resolution. No dead weight. The pebble — not the void.
• 8:37
  Figure: Hold that, because the career turns on a place where those two readings collide. [pause] 1993. Calvin Klein hires him — on the suggestion of the hotelier Ian Schrager — to build a flagship on Madison Avenue. A former Art Deco bank. He guts it into York stone, black and white, and air. More room for contemplation than shopping, the press said.
• 9:02
  Ground: This is the store everyone copied.
• 9:04
  Figure: This is the template. And there's a single gesture in it that tells you exactly what the minimum costs. The windows. Pawson half-jokes to Klein that he should use single panes of glass, pavement to third floor. Klein says: yes, do it. [pause] So they order panes thirty-four feet high, twelve feet wide — the biggest the glass company could float. And to install them, Madison Avenue gets closed. Four weekends. [pause] And commercially it seeded everything. Calvin Klein stores in Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, and then the whole white-box era. Jil Sander's boutiques by Michael Gabellini. Helmut Lang's SoHo store by Richard Gluckman. A generation of luxury flagships that turned shopping into something like visiting a gallery.
• 9:53
  Ground: To make it look like there's almost nothing there, you shut down one of the most expensive streets on earth. Four times over.
• 10:01
  Figure: That's the irony in one image. And not everyone admired it. Rem Koolhaas — who built his own experiential stores for Prada — called that kind of minimalism a stealth laundering of luxury. A way to minimize the shame of consumption.
• 10:16
  Ground: He built that sentence to sting, and it does.
• 10:19
  Figure: It's meant to. And you'd expect that to be the end of the moral story — minimalism as the most refined possible packaging for spending money. Except the store went and did something no one could have designed.
• 10:32
  Ground: The monks.
• 10:34
  Figure: The store went into his book, Minimum, in 1996. And a community of Trappist monks in France — Cistercians, the same order as those Yorkshire ruins — are looking to found a new monastery in the Czech Republic. One of them, Brother Thomas, reads the book. And in the photographs of a Calvin Klein fashion store, the monks recognize their own lives. The austerity. The reflection. So they phone him. [pause] His reaction: I thought it was a practical joke. Who gives you your ideal project. The Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr. He restores a derelict Baroque manor, adds three new wings, the monks do much of the labor themselves. The church is lit through slots that drop shafts of sun onto the altar. Consecrated in September 2004. Around twenty, twenty-five monks, in what the abbot himself called one of Europe's most atheistic regions. Still there. Still drawing young men to try the life.
• 11:35
  Ground: So here's where I get stuck, and I don't want to skate past it. The same rooms — the same visual language — read as high luxury on Madison Avenue and as poverty and prayer in Bohemia. Identical means. Opposite meanings.
• 11:52
  Figure: That's the tension of the whole career, standing in two buildings.
• 11:57
  Ground: And I don't think you get out of it by saying the form is neutral and only the use differs. Because it isn't neutral. There's a detail that's been nagging me. [pause] The young monks at Nový Dvůr — some of them couldn't understand why they needed costly, sophisticated architecture at all. They'd rather have worked less on the building and studied more. [pause] Think about who that is. The people the space is supposedly for — the actual ascetics, the ones who really do own nothing — didn't want the expensive emptiness. They found the polished minimum a little beside the point. [pause] So whose austerity is it? If the monks would have settled for a plain shed and more hours to pray, then the refined version of poverty — the one it takes a master to build — isn't really for them. It's for us. For the people who look at it. The emptiness is a picture of restraint, made for an audience that isn't restrained at all.
• 13:05
  Figure: That's the Koolhaas charge again, aimed at the monastery instead of the store. And I think it half-lands. Half. Because Pawson doesn't deny the money. Accused of minimalism-as-luxury, he says it straight — sometimes his clients are very wealthy, sometimes they have almost nothing, but any valued building costs money. He concedes the price. What he won't concede is that the price is the meaning.
• 13:31
  Ground: Go on.
• 13:33
  Figure: His defense is that light and proportion and material aren't free, and pretending they should be is its own dishonesty. Getting a room to the state where it feels genuinely good — controlling the light, the scale, the junctions — takes time and money and experience. So he's not laundering the cost. He's saying the cost buys something real, and the something real is available to a monk and a fashion house alike, even though the financing and context are radically different.
• 14:01
  Ground: But the monk didn't want to pay for it. That's the piece that stays sharp for me.
• 14:05
  Figure: It stays sharp. I'm not going to sand it down.
• 14:08
  Ground: And it gets sharper up close, because the effortlessness is engineered down to things nobody will ever see. At his own house — Home Farm, in the Cotswolds — there's a guest bathroom sink that's a single enormous block of marble, and all you see of it is a thin edge under the wood. The rest is hidden mass. He said it himself: doesn't make sense from a lot of points of view, but it made sense for me.
• 14:37
  Figure: A hidden marble block. That's the whole practice in one fixture. Enormous quarried weight, concealed so that what you perceive is a thin line and a great deal of nothing.
• 14:49
  Ground: And does the nothing hold up? That's my real question about the cold charge. People always call his rooms cold, and he hates it — he says the deepest sense of well-being comes from simplicity, that an unadorned expanse of Douglas fir or limestone, with light moving over it, is warmer and more alive than any squashy sofa. Give me a bench any time, he says.
• 15:14
  Figure: And there's a counter-fact I can't ignore. When the Design Museum showed his work — the exhibition called Plain Space — a critic noticed that after a single week the beautiful pale floor was already scuffed. The materials failing in ordinary use. The minimum photographs like eternity and lives like everything else — it scratches.
• 15:36
  Ground: That's the honest bruise on the whole thing. In the photograph the surface is perfect, the light is perfect, and time has stopped. In the room, a week later, there are heel-marks. The emptiness needs everything to stay still to keep meaning what it means.
• 15:53
  Figure: And the building he made tells the same story at full scale. The Design Museum — his first big public commission, and his largest project. It reopened in that oak-lined Kensington shell in November 2016. They projected six hundred and fifty thousand visitors a year. The first year it drew about seven hundred and eighty thousand.
• 16:12
  Ground: So it worked.
• 16:14
  Figure: The rooms worked. The finances didn't. Within three years the museum was running something like a one-point-two-million-pound operating deficit, and in 2019 — before any pandemic — it had to be rescued by a three-million-pound loan after its position was called not sustainable. Then 2021 comes and the year's attendance falls to eighty-three thousand.
• 16:36
  Ground: None of which is his fault, exactly.
• 16:39
  Figure: None of which is architecture's fault. But it punctures the idea that the perfectly resolved object floats free of the world. The most finished space still has to be heated, staffed, insured, and filled. The minimum doesn't exempt you from the mess. It just declines to show it.
• 16:56
  Ground: Let me go to the objects, because that's where I trust the whole argument most — and it's where it actually started. The cutlery.
• 17:06
  Figure: When Objects Work. Belgium, 2005.
• 17:10
  Ground: And the origin is the tell. The whole product line grew out of equipping the refectory of that monastery — the monks needed things to eat with, so he designed them. Mirror-polished stainless steel. He called it the minimum cutlery required. One handle profile running through knife, fork and spoon, so the set reads as a single family. A three-prong fork instead of four. [pause] And you can hear the objection already — three prongs, how precious. But pick it up. A fork is a decision about the hand before it's a decision about the eye. The number of tines, the weight, where the balance sits, the exact junction where the handle becomes the head — that's all felt, not seen. [pause] His line about it is: I seek the comfort of exactness. Comfort. Not severity. He's claiming that precision itself is a bodily pleasure — that a thing made to its minimum sits better in the hand than a thing made to impress. And I think that's testable. You either feel it or you don't, and no argument gets you there.
• 18:17
  Figure: That's the whole engine of this show in one object — a claim that can only be settled by holding it.
• 18:23
  Ground: And the method under it is completely portable. Look at his oldest material relationship — the Danish wood people, Dinesen. It goes back to 1992. He specifies their Douglas fir for his own floors — planks forty-five centimeters wide, fifteen meters long, the first time they'd ever supplied a private house. And then, instead of designing a table and cutting the wood to fit it, he lets the plank's given dimension set the proportion, and lifts it beyond its intended form into a table, a bench, a stool.
• 18:57
  Figure: The material's fact decides the design.
• 19:00
  Ground: He takes the size the thing already is, honors it, then obsesses over one junction. That's it. That's the whole method — not make it white, not throw things away, but let the given set the size, and put all the attention on where two things meet.
• 19:20
  Figure: Which brings us to the part everyone gets wrong about the man. You'd assume the person behind all this is an ascetic. A monk who happened not to take vows. He's the opposite.
• 19:31
  Ground: The mind's a mess.
• 19:33
  Figure: His words: is your mind as clean as the space? No — quite the opposite. It's crammed with stuff, and my brain is all over the place. That's why I like things ordered. The austerity isn't a self-portrait. It's compensation. He builds the calm he can't generate on the inside.
• 19:52
  Ground: He works at a desk below street level, facing a blank wall. Lets the others in the studio look out the window. He'd rather have nothing in front of him.
• 20:03
  Figure: And at home it's a negotiation, not a doctrine. His wife Catherine has her own interiors practice and previously worked at Colefax and Fowler. When he built the family house she asked for financial restraint and a comfortable sofa. The Home Farm curtains are undyed boiled wool — she describes them, wonderfully, as about as close to a monk's habit as you can get.
• 20:26
  Ground: Life is compromise. Even his. His own sister once mailed him a blank sheet of paper. His membership card to the minimalists' club.
• 20:35
  Figure: There's one last place the empty room stops being innocent, and it isn't aesthetic — it's physical. Weight. Carbon. Because the palette that reads as pure — poured concrete, big single panes of glass, quarried stone — isn't light at all. In-situ concrete is one of the most carbon-heavy things you can build with. Cement and steel and aluminum together are around a quarter of global emissions. And large-format glass, thick or laminated, is expensive in carbon, because you're melting sand at enormous temperatures.
• 21:09
  Ground: So the minimum is heavy.
• 21:11
  Figure: The look of nothing can cost a great deal of something. There's a target now — the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge — trying to push the embodied carbon of a house down under three hundred kilos per square meter, from a baseline near a thousand. And a lot of what defines high-end minimalism — the concrete, the frameless glazing — is exactly what those numbers are trying to squeeze back out.
• 21:36
  Ground: Here's what's strange to me, though. Follow it one more step. Of all his materials, the one that sounds the most extravagant — the marble, the stone — may be the lower-carbon one. [pause] Because stone isn't manufactured the way concrete is. It's quarried — still cut and processed, but a lot of the making already happened, geologically, over millions of years. So its carbon can be substantially lower than concrete in comparable applications — one engineer's figure is that structural stone can emit as little as fifteen percent of the equivalent concrete slab. [pause] Which means the thing we read as pure luxury — a great block of marble — might be the honest material. And the thing we read as plain and modern and rational — the poured gray concrete — is the one wrecking the sky. The whole moral coding is upside down. [pause] And large-format glazing is carbon-intensive too. But without a project-specific assessment, we can't rank Pawson's marble sink or his glass wall by impact.
• 22:50
  Figure: So even the ecology refuses to sort him cleanly. In the generic comparisons the stone he's accused of splurging on carries less carbon than concrete — but which of his own gestures weighs worst, we just can't say.
• 23:06
  Ground: So what's actually left, once you clear away the easy version. Because I came in thinking the empty room was the simple thing — and it's the most loaded thing in the house.
• 23:17
  Figure: What's left is the distinction he's fought for the whole time. Minimalism as a style — white walls, no furniture, throw things out — is available to anyone, means almost nothing, and is most of what wears the name. The minimum as he defines it — nothing left to take away, no dead weight, every junction resolved — is nearly impossible to reach, costs enormously, and can't be faked. The one word covers both. That's the confusion he's been trapped in since he was called a minimalist and, as he says, accepted the title he was given.
• 23:52
  Ground: And the two don't reconcile. That's what I keep landing on. He never resolves the luxury question, and I don't think we did either. The monk who would rather have worked less on the building and studied more is still standing there at the end.
• 24:07
  Figure: He is. Pawson gives you the honest form of the paradox, not the solution. He says it takes great discipline to reduce until you can't subtract anymore — and he never pretends that discipline is free. He puts the cost in the open. The four closed weekends on Madison Avenue. The buried block of marble. The money and the time and the experience.
• 24:30
  Ground: I think that's the thing I'll keep. Not the white room. The admission that the white room is expensive. Because the lie in most minimalism is that simplicity is easy — that you arrive by removing, by having less, by wanting less. And everything about him says the reverse. That the plain thing is the end of a long, costly, mostly invisible labor, and the plainer it looks, the more it took.
• 24:59
  Figure: The test he offers is atmosphere. If you're not affected when you walk into a building, then it isn't architecture. Not grand — affected. Something has to happen to your body in the space, or the subtraction was only subtraction.
• 25:14
  Ground: And light does the affecting. That's his first material, before stone, before proportion. He quotes Louis Kahn — no architecture without natural light — and then puts it in his own blunt words: light has to come first, or you're finished. And as soon as you have light, he says, you have color.
• 25:35
  Figure: So an empty white room isn't empty, and isn't white. It's a surface built to catch a moving thing he didn't make and can't own. The light does the last of the work. Everything else is getting out of its way — and it costs a fortune to get that far out of the way.
• 25:50
  Ground: Which is a strange kind of humility. You spend all that money and all that control to build a room whose whole purpose is to vanish behind the weather.
• 26:01
  Figure: That might be the most exact thing you can say about him. He isn't chasing emptiness. He's chasing the moment a made thing stops calling attention to itself — and he accepts that reaching it can demand substantial cost and control.
• 26:15
  Ground: So the empty room was never empty. It was full of everything he took out, and full of what it cost to take it out, and full of the light he left the space to receive.
• 26:28
  Ground: When we call a thing simple, are we praising what's been taken away — or quietly hiding everything it cost to take it away?