John Pawson is the arch minimalist whose work fulfils so many of the clichés of modern architecture. The spare, expansive and, well, empty spaces of his buildings all look something like art galleries. There aren’t many cushions.
But the man behind minimalism in the UK, whose first monographic exhibition in this country opens at the Design Museum tomorrow, is, in person, unlike the cliché of the architect. He’s not arrogant, he doesn’t seem to care that much about his place in history and he is self-aware enough to know that even the most famous architect isn’t really that famous. Pawson is a friend of Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic (and Sudjic has been generous to his friends since becoming director of the museum) but, probably more importantly, Pawson is designing a new home for the institution in the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, which makes this a timely exhibition. Pawson exhibits his work here today, then everyone else will exhibit in a Pawson in 2014 when the project is slated for completion.
That self-effacing side of Pawson comes through in the show, which has photographs, drawings and huge material samples from Pawson’s recent works, as well as a full-size, Pawson-designed room; what he calls a "little temple". Sudjic told me the exhibition build is one of the most ambitious things that has ever been built in the awkward galleries in Shad Thames. But I suppose it is in the nature of minimalism that it doesn’t immediately strike you as such. The temple room is nice, optically confusing in a James Turrell kind of way and a decent example of what Pawson strives for in his work. Being in it is to experience the pleasure of an architecture that almost disappears.
Pawson’s work exists somewhere between extreme luxury and artistic abstraction. There is no social project, no "machines for living" and little sense of the urban scale in his work. Instead you get a design for the interior of a posh apartment with full-height onyx screens and custom-made Richard Long artworks adorning the walls. His one London landmark — the Sackler Crossing at Kew Gardens — has little or nothing to do with the history of that landscape, or the history of park architecture in England, but it is pretty, inventive and pared back.
The Sackler Crossing’s minimal, tough beauty should be a model idiom for municipal projects, but proselytising is not Pawson’s style. Go along to this nicely presented show and see some very beautiful things you could never afford.
Tomorrow until January 30, 2011 (020 7940 8790, designmuseum.org
John Pawson: Plain Space
Design Museum, SE1
