John Pawson on Minimalism as a Way of Life

Follow us on Instagram (@slowdown.media) and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive behind-the-scenes updates and carefully curated musings.  

TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, John. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

JOHN PAWSON: Thank you.

SB: How incredible to be here in your home in the Cotswolds, recording this.

JP: Well, it’s very comfortable for me. [Laughter] Thank you for coming all that way. I haven’t had to do much … yet.

SB: Well, you did recently come back to the U.K. from India and Japan. These are two countries that have been incredibly important to you, I would say, to you and your work.  Instrumental, even, certainly in the case of Japan. What stands out from your most recent trip?

JP: I think going back to both of them, both places I’ve had extraordinary experiences in. Of course, with India, where…. One visit, my client, we were in a terrible car crash, and my client was killed.

SB: Oh, wow.

JP: That’s always, it doesn’t prey on me or anything, but it’s always at the back of my mind. The irony—

SB: You were in the car?

JP: Yeah, I was in the car.

SB: Oh, wow.

JP: The driver was maimed for life, and I lost Mark. You have to step in and organize things, even though you’re in shock yourself, because there’s no…. India’s quite wild in the countryside.

SB: When was this?

JP: Oh, this is a long time ago. This is in 2002. But these things stay. You might as well—

SB: Yeah, yeah, twenty years later….

JP: It might as well be yesterday. But we’ve had very, very good times. It’s just, I never quite get over that. I know exactly what happens when you’re driving. But I have the same in England—it’s not especially India. 

Japan, of course, I spent four years there, so it’s always very special going back.

SB: Yeah, Japan, we’ve talked a bit about this in the past, but it has played a vital and certainly a formative role in your approach to architecture. You’ve also built many projects there, including a Calvin Klein store, which was your first commission in the country, in 1994, and Tetsuka House from 2005. Your journey in Japan began with a short-lived vision— [Laughs]

JP: I know where this is going.

SB: …of becoming a Zen Buddhist monk. We don’t need to go deep into that story because you’ve previously told it beautifully and hilariously, and to the listeners who are curious, you can definitely Google “John Pawson, Japan, Zen Buddhist temple” and you will probably find the story. [Laughs]

JP: Find the gory details, yeah.

SB: Rather than becoming a Zen Buddhist monk, you stayed in Japan and taught English for three years. During this time, you also befriended the designer Shiro Kuramata, a relationship that would prove life- and career-changing. This fostered your interest in architecture further. You visited traditional ryokan inns, the temples of Kyoto, the Katsura Imperial Villa, and these new [Tadao] Ando buildings that were going up at the time. In hindsight, how do you think about these early years in Japan, and also your time since engaged with Japan, with Japanese culture? You return to the country often.

JP: I went to Japan because I was already keen on Japanese things and the things behind Japanese, I suppose, sixteenth- or seventeenth-century architecture, but I was also influenced by my hometown of Halifax, in Yorkshire, and the moors there, which are treeless. It’s not that Japan was the beginning of my journey, but it certainly cemented everything, aesthetically, that I was interested in. 

Also, it was a strange time in a way because Nagoya is not a metropolis. And also, Halifax in Yorkshire is not either. But if you spend time in those places, which I did growing up or after I left my father’s business, spending three or four years in Japan, you spend them in Nagoya, which is not such an exciting place, culturally. They’re very nice people, but you have a lot of free time, which is not exciting. In a way, boredom is the wrong word, but that quiet time allows your mind to wander and think, and think about what might be possible in the future, really. Halifax stimulated me in a different way, and Nagoya did as well.

SB: How do you think about your “Kuramata time,” I guess I should call it?

JP: Well, I had that naïvety of, or— I hate to call it arrogance, but I had that confidence at age 24 to call him up and say, “How do you do? I’m John Pawson. Can we have a coffee?” [Laughs] He was a well-established, very famous, top-of-his-game designer, architect in Japan, and here was I, literally nothing. He must have thought, Well, there must be something about this chap to ring up. He must be important in some way. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: Which of course I wasn’t. It changed everything a bit, me meeting him. I didn’t spend that much time there, but he was very kind to me. Knowing him gave you an introduction to anybody in the design world or the arts.

SB: How do you see Kuramata alive in your work, in your practice? What elements or things do you think you took from him?

JP: I was more attracted to his interior design work and his architecture than I was to the furniture because I’m not a big furniture person. He said to me, “Oh, you will understand.” I didn’t express it, of course, so bluntly to him, but he said, “You’ll get the point of the work and the poetry, in the future.” I never really have. Of course, I’ve appreciated it, and it’s what has made him famous. I’m quite happy with very, very little furniture and not his art, really.

SB: I want to bring up Minimum, this 1996 book.

JP: What’s that?

SB: [Laughs] It’s this book that someone named John Pawson put together, about a decade into his career—

JP: Yeah.

SB: Which next year is turning 30. And in it, you write quite a bit about Japan, including about the Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū’s attitudes, that they “perhaps have even more relevance today than they did in Japan’s golden age, four centuries ago, despite vastly changed circumstances.” I was just thinking about this. In the three decades since you wrote that, it’s probably become only more so in this time-blinkered age we find ourselves in.

JP: I think minimum is a very good word. The definition of it does express everything you want about the spareness. But “minimalism” or “minimal” is always a dangerous area. To try and make it into a movement or a brand or a cult, I’ve always found it difficult. Right at the beginning, they tried to make an “ism” out of it and suggested there was a movement, and they couldn’t find any other minimal architects. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: So they lumped me with all sorts of high-tech and postmodern people, which I just didn’t see the logic of. But twenty years later, or thirty years later, there are lots and lots of very good architects doing minimal work. When I see them, I think, “Gosh.…” Either, “Did I do that?” Or rather, more to the point, “I would like to have done that,” because they’re actually doing what I do, and often doing it better in the photographs.

It’s a strange thing to, at the time, finding it difficult because you were swimming against the stream, and then, suddenly, because you haven’t been looking up from your desk, it’s become very popular. There are lots of practitioners of it.

SB: Classically, I feel like trends flip-flop, though, no? It does seem like we’re in a maximalist moment right now.

JP: Well, it’s always been the case that there’s both sides to it, and we’re talking, really, historically, in, obviously, a very narrow thing. As soon as you get labeled, then there’s a chance that whatever you’ve been labeled as will go out of fashion or not count or…. But it’s all bullocks.

SB: [Laughs]

JP: No, because it’s not to do with fashion or what’s in vogue or anything. It’s to do with quality in an idea and something that you are pursuing. Sen no Rikyū, from what you read and what you study is, he’s one man in four hundred years or five hundred years. He’s once in a lifetime….

SB: Once in many lifetimes.

JP: Once in several millennia. He’s the man.

SB: Just staying on Japan a bit longer—you write of this concept, shibui. That’s S-H-I-B-U-I. I’d never heard of this. You describe it as “the studied restraint that might be best described as knowing when to stop.” [Laughter] You’re writing about it in relation to the work of Ando and Kuramata, who both exhibit this….

JP: Shibui, yeah.

SB: I guess I’d say you’ve proven yourself to be a shibui architect, too.

JP: Well, you could never say that about yourself.

SB: [Laughs] 

JP: If you’re English and modest—or trying to be modest. Restraint…. I can see how difficult it is to be restrained. It’s like name-dropping, or if you’re in conversation and you have an idea or you want to tell an anecdote or a story, and if it’s somebody famous, you’re dropping the name, and you can’t do that really, politely, unless you’re brash. [Laughs]

SB: Yeah, that seems like a very, maybe properly British approach. I don’t know that Americans take quite the same tact.

JP: [Laughter] I’ve got a list here, can I just tell you the famous people I’ve met this week? I was just walking down the street….

SB: I think what’s interesting in the context of your career is, on some level—not necessarily your vicinity to famous people, but I do feel it’s worth bringing up Calvin Klein here. I bring him up because, and I know I mentioned that you had done his store in Japan, but this year, actually, marks thirty years since you completed your New York City flagship for Calvin Klein.

JP: Wow. Yeah.

SB: This is a project that changed your life. You first met him in 1993—through the hotelier Ian Schrager—and you’ve spoken about this before, so I won’t go into that fortuitous introduction, but instead of asking about this, when I was researching for today, I came across this New York Times review about the flagship store by Paul Goldberger.

JP: Oh.

SB: I wanted to quote from it, because I feel Paul was early onto the John Pawson tip. And how he writes about your work and the project, there’s some really interesting foreshadowing. He writes, “There can be a beauty, even a power, in spareness, and a majesty to carefully wrought austerity. Like good prose, good design has been edited to its essence, and possesses both discipline and dignity.” He continues, “With its almost monastic austerity, the Calvin Klein store is about as far from warm and cuddly as you can get. But it is a truly impressive piece of work, self-assured and rigorous, and it creates a stunning setting for Mr. Klein’s products.”

JP: Wow.

SB: I think it’s a testament to the power that it lasted for twenty-five years unchanged. Taking a moment to consider this thirty years on, I wanted to ask, where do you see this particular project within what’s occurred post, for you?

JP: Well, as you said, I owe everything to Calvin. It not just changed my career, but changed my life. It was a very nice relationship. It was interesting because he was looking for somebody young that he could work with that would really realize his ideas. It was quite funny, the two of us together, because neither of us can draw very well. [Laughs] So, it was an interesting couple of years of design work together. But it’s very much his—his imprint is there completely on it.

Which is true of most clients, is that each project you do with a different client is going to have a different imprint. But talking career-wise, it gave other people the confidence. Calvin didn’t need it. He had an instinct and he had the confidence, and he didn’t need me to be authenticated by somebody else, which is very lucky for me. As soon as I did the store, then Cathay Pacific, the airline, it was easier for them to hire me—and the monks.

SB: Yeah, we’ll get to the monks. Just to return to this Goldberger piece, there’s another sentence which just totally stuck out to me. He writes, “Mr. Pawson understands the essence of minimalism, which is not just a matter of eliminating things, but of distilling what remains into something as close to perfect as possible.” And notes that your work “brings to mind Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which counsels that the essence of good writing is not brevity, but ‘that every word tell.’” Reading this, I immediately thought of—I was going through some of your other books, other than Minimal, and I came across the epigraph of Plain Space from 2010. It’s a Raymond Carver quote: “It’s difficult to be simple.” 

JP: [Laughs]

SB: So, taking a literary allusion—and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak about this or asked you about this—but do you think about your architecture as a form of sentence-making or storytelling?

JP: Not necessarily. While you were talking about it—or reading Paul Goldberger’s words—what’s very, very nice for me is that describing architecture with words is more accurate than photographs for me. It’s much more evocative and a better way to describe something. Obviously, nothing better than being there, but not being able to be there, to have it written about. And he, Paul Goldberger, writes very well, very articulate—and minimal. I remember the piece very well. 

SB: Yeah. The other side of the piece, which I haven’t mentioned is, he bashes Peter Marino’s Armani store.

JP: Oh, well, you should always try and be positive about everything. I’m not in the business of, certainly, other people’s work.

SB: Yeah. Well, it’s in the name, architecture critic, right? 

JP: [Laughs]

SB: I think it’s interesting that you mentioned writing, because to me, when I think about your creative process, I think about photography, obviously. It’s so central to what you do in so many ways. How do you view the role of photography?

JP: Well, photography is very particular and presents to you, each time, with one view, which is the guy taking it, I guess, or the person taking the photograph. In my case, I wouldn’t ever think of my photographs as being able to describe the architecture in the round, so to speak. It can describe one aspect of it, or you can highlight things.

That’s why I think that the written word is better for description. Of course, if you just presented clients with words, they’d very quickly say, “Well, where’s the photograph?” I say to the guys in the office, “Show me the photograph.” When they come back and say they saw a light falling on a window in the house, I say, “Well, where is the photograph? Don’t just tell me about it.” I’m the worst person for that. If I had a dream, it would be to have somebody write about each project in depth.

SB: A book about your work without any photos? [Laughs]

JP: Well, yeah, I guess. But then, I was also thinking, “Gosh, that would.…” Yeah, exactly.

SB: And that’s not a biography?

JP: No, no, no, no. Just about the actual building or the work, or the— I don’t know. I mean, there’s been.… Bruce Chatwin did that short piece [“Wabi”], which was really nice.

SB: Who you did a project for very early on.

JP: Yeah. He wrote the piece inside an apartment I’d done, and it took him, I think, four days of writing, for a few hundred words. It was a crafted piece, alright. He hand-wrote it. After he’d finished, because I was around, in and out from time to time, I saw him, and he’d be filling up the wastepaper basket with these handwritten things, which, of course, I rescued. Now I can’t find them.

Architects are supposed to be good at describing their own work; otherwise, they can’t get jobs. You do need to be able to convince people or to describe things to get things, what you want. But it’s not a facility I have, really. Clients always, when we go first time to a site and I’m looking around, you have to deal with them as clients, because it’s usually the first time, and then you’ve got to deal with the site, and then you’ve got to tell them what your idea is, even though, of course, you don’t have an idea, because you’ve only just been to the site. I now know why architects do that false thing of sketching onsite for the first moment. Because it shuts the clients up.

SB: Yeah, time to think, time to convince.

JP: Yeah, exactly.

SB: [Laughs] I want to go back to Minimum, this 1996 book I mentioned earlier, because it explores simplicity as it can be applied to architecture, but also, this broader idea of simplicity as a way of life. I feel, writing this book, at least how I see it and interpret it, was this catalyzing moment for you, in a way, putting words to paper that helped define, not as a manifesto, but helped refine or define what it is you were up to. Is that how you see it?

JP: Very much. I think it has been misinterpreted, of course. Actually, what happened early on is that Phaidon had this idea to write a book about the notion of simplicity in art and architecture, and they asked Deyan Sudjic to write it. For whatever reason, it wasn’t for him. So he proposed me, and I said, “Oh, brilliant. I’ll write a hundred thousand words about it, and you pay for me to have a year off.” Because I didn’t know anything about publishing or writing or the finances. I thought they’d support me for a year while I tinkered with this thing. They said, “Well, actually, we’ll give you a small share of the book,” or whatever they call it, a fee, “and we only want ten thousand words because we’re an illustrated book company.” I think I did twelve thousand words. In my head, it was going to be more—more about the thinking.

SB: There’s a beautiful bit about time in the book, and I wanted to quote it. You write, “This is a thread that runs through five thousand years of mankind’s existence, that links the pyramids of ancient Egypt and the classicism of the Hellenic temples of Sicily with the monasteries of the Cistercians”—maybe a foreshadowing [laughs]—“and the furniture made by the Shakers. A thread that spans all nations and all civilizations.” I was just thinking about this profundity. I know you mentioned that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japan interests you; I know from other conversations, ancient Egypt, classical Greece, these things are deep interests of yours. The book itself is sort of a catalogue, in some ways, of your affinities. It’s going from Rothko to Judd to Le Corbusier, to Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, to Agnes Martin…. I could go on.

JP: Please. No, go on. [Laughter]

SB: No, it’s interesting that it’s sort of a blueprint in some sense, or a sort of way…. It’s a deeply personal book. It’s more than just a book about—

JP: Oh, it is. Also, you have an idea, but then you’re not quite sure how you’re going to realize it. I had to start somewhere. I just started with things that had always attracted me to them, like Brâncuși or, as you said, Agnes Martin, or certain artists, certain buildings, certain periods, some engineering things, bridges and so on, without….

SB: You have a B-2 bomber in the book. That was a curveball. [Laughs]

JP: Yeah. [Laughs] Yes, it’s like there are so many no-nos. Anything to do with war or guns is the wrong thing. Just the form—I think it’s since perhaps been swapped.

SB: Yeah. How do you think about bookmaking within what it is that you do? Because you have made many books. I think you’ve made a lot more books than most architects make books.

JP: I think I’ve made more books than most people make books. [Laughter] There was one point at which they used to say, “Oh, you are the architect that does the books.”

SB: [Laughs]

JP: Before that, I was the architect that did Calvin Klein or the monks. I mean, books are hard work, but they’re important for me as a way of looking back and rationalizing the thoughts and collating them and then moving on. I’ve been lucky with Phaidon. Because it’s a sort of discipline to do a book, and collecting the material and editing and so on.

SB: Are you working on a book now?

JP: Always. There was a period when I really had done a bit too much, so I took a few years off.

SB: The most recent book that Phaidon put out with your name on it was actually written by your friend Deyan Sudjic. Our friend. He writes in it about this notion of the timeless, which I wanted to quote from, because I think some people like to describe your work as timeless. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. Maybe we could get into that. But he writes, “‘Timeless’ is one of the most overused words in any architectural discussion. John’s architecture is of course of its time, but, seen as a body of work, it is striking how little touched it has been by time passing. It is its connection with the fundamentals of light and space that makes its qualities lasting, and memorable.” How do you think about time, this temporalness in your work? Do you think there is a timeless nature, or where do you see time playing in to your projects?

JP: Well, I think you were right when you said there isn’t such a thing as timelessness. I’m sure with careful look at it or something, people will be able to date my work in the future if…. I’ve never done it for the legacy part of it. I’ve just been very much in the moment. There aren’t really rules. I mean, there are rules in how I design, but humor is not something that you can put into architecture, I believe. It doesn’t stand up in bricks and mortar, and it doesn’t stand the [test of] time. I tend to be quite careful about how I design so that it is at least lasting. 

Having been doing it now for forty or fifty years, I’m in the position that some of the houses or the projects are thirty or forty years old. What’s very, very nice for me is how some of them, like the Mallorca house, is exactly the same as it was thirty years ago and is enjoyed—they rent it out quite a lot—so it’s enjoyed by tons of different people. On the other hand, Tilty Barn has been bought by a Chinese fashion designer, so he will live in it very similarly, but it’s a completely different owner. The Doris Saatchi house, on the Hay’s Mews in the West End of London, that’s now got a new American owner who wants to keep it the same. Of course, they develop a patina, which is nice.

SB: Well, I think there’s something interesting that occurs when a building is carefully made and then cared for. There’s sort of a shepherding that sometimes occurs, right? Because there’s a respect. It’s like an object. It’s like passing down an heirloom in some sense, right?

JP: Absolutely. The house in London we’ve been in since 1997, so that’s getting on for thirty years—just under. It’s hard because I’m 76 in May—75 now—but it’s only been pointed out to me that I am. [Laughs] I sit here thinking I’m your age or younger. If I could look in the mirror, then, of course, it’s a rude shock. To stop and think, Well, there’s forty years’ work behind…. Because I don’t feel, really, any different, and I don’t design in any significantly different way. What’s nice for me is the process or the mechanics or that the office runs a bit more smoothly, and the clients are respectful. There’s a great team, and there’s a much bigger variety of projects, so you can build a bigger, wider, more catholic portfolio, which I’m interested in. I’m interested in doing different things all the time and not necessarily what people think of as architecture. For me, knives and forks are architecture.

SB: Yeah. You’ve done knives, forks, bowls, lighting, a chair.

JP: Yeah, which is the most difficult, normally.

SB: A few yachts.

JP: Yeah. A ballet, bridge, and at different scales. We’re working in seventeen different countries, which is also nice—different cultures.

SB: How has your relationship to time changed as the firm has scaled or evolved? Because I imagine early on in the practice, you probably had maybe more time to work on a project, focus, and think.

JP: Well, right at the beginning when Claudio [Silvestrin] and I did the Mallorca house, that was our only project for six months. There was nothing else, so we kind of overworked it. I mean, we went back to, but you just keep on….

SB: Well, I think something that gets lost in conversations, because, as you pointed out, we sort of exist in this idea of architecture as image, where it’s like, it’s the classic— What was the Philip Johnson quote?

JP: Oh, yeah.

SB: The “three F’s.” [Editor’s note: The Johnson phrase Spencer is referring to is “finish, photograph, forget.”]

JP: Yeah.

SB: I’m going to forget it, but the second one’s photography, and the third one’s finish, right?

JP: Yeah, I know. I think forget is definitely not in my vocabulary. Definitely finish, but not forget.

SB: The thing is, I think the time that goes into building. To design, to take care, I think that then translates on the other side of it. Even if the work—which I think is the point of a lot of your work—may appear simple, it’s all the layers and depth that occurred during the time of the making, of the design. The things that you don’t see that were eliminated or are subtly there and present, but aren’t screaming out for attention.

JP: No, it’s funny because I think early on, I think there was one of those aphorisms which said, “Don’t tell me about the struggle.” Whereas, of course, there’s this whole movement that want to show the workings of how you get to these projects, how they get to be made and finished. 

Our stuff takes an awful long time and an awful lot of reworking and working. Occasionally, we get careful and scientific and work out how many hours or days or people you need to do the job, and how long it’s going to take. Of course, we can’t afford to do anything because they’re all…. When you work it out, you just need so much time if you’re designing things in detail. It’s not possible, but it would be nice to do new objects or new stuff for the architecture—new vases or new tables or chairs. We’re doing more of that because we’re in a position [to do so].

SB: Yeah. I mean, yours is an expansive definition of architecture, I think, even though some people might not consider it so.

JP: Well, I don’t know whether I still do, but I come in for a lot of criticism. If you do a cookbook and you’re a serious architect, they seem to see that that doesn’t quite match. But I don’t understand that because I just take an interest in most things that are going on around me.

SB: Yeah, cooking and architecture definitely have a connection.

JP: I thought so.

SB: Ingredients, materials, the senses. [Laughter] Taste?

JP: Yeah, definitely taste, yeah.

SB: This is a good segue to Home Farm, where we’re sitting. [Laughter] You did do a cookbook, Home Farm Cooking, with your wife, Catherine. This project [Home Farm] involved five intense years of work—probably more than that in terms of gestation and just ideas you had about a country house. You created what I would describe as architectural forensics to realize this place. [Laughter] I mean, there’s a certain intensity of feeling here, walking the grounds. I’ve only been here for a few hours now and I feel it. This alchemy of materials and atmosphere and character and light and shadow. I’m sure a big part of this is because the project is so personal. I’m sure another part of it is the very location where we’re sitting. I mean, the light is just constantly changing as we’re talking right now. 

I guess this is a big question here, but how did you bring together this idiosyncratic hodgepodge of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century structures, and how did you make sense of this site to make it your own?

JP: Well, it is what we do. Half the work that we do is working on existing buildings of different historic periods and things like that. And half of what we do is contemporary and new build. Atmosphere is obviously, to me, the number one thing you’re after. But it is highly complicated and it does take time. Obviously, you don’t have everything in place when you start. I had to consider the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-century hinges on different doors around the place, because they needed to be replaced. Are you going to have modern ones? Are you going to have the right period? That’s just one of three thousand decisions.

The difficulty with your own place—or not difficulty, the challenge—is that you have too many options. So you review it too much. If you are not the client, although I sort of make myself the client at every job, but you have a deadline and you have budgets, and you have what’s considered appropriate. Because even the most well-off or secure clients don’t necessarily want to spend all their money on a room by me. So you have strict budgets and things like that, and time frame. That’s the difficulty with your own place. It’s not necessarily an advantage. You would think it is, to have that freedom. Also, you need the time to learn about certain things—all the materials, the way they’re used, and then the layers of history and everything. Well, you said it: It’s a bit more complicated than it looks.

SB: I’m sure you’d probably call it this, too. There’s a sort of choreography going on here. There’s a dance between the old and the new, and maybe a rhythm, too.

JP: Absolutely. All those words, and choreography is very apt because when you…. I know this because it’s our own. When you move in, you have to learn the choreography. Actually, it takes a long time. We still aren’t there, five years later or whatever, however long we’ve been here. And I don’t think we will be. We’ll keep on learning, I think.

SB: Yeah. Well, you’ve said, “It’s only through full sensory engagement that we can truly connect with a sense of place.” I feel it here, but I imagine that you probably have a different idea every time you come here. “Oh, this should become that, or.…”

JP: Yeah, not so much in terms of function…. I’m not sure, really, but it’s always different. Of course, light changes it every second.

SB: Yeah. I now have the sun on my back, and I didn’t just a second ago.

JP: And you are illuminated. Your face is illuminated. You’ve gone from silhouette to full spotlight. [Laughter]

SB: I’ve got the monastic glow. [Laughs]

JP: Yeah. That’s what is so nice about, yeah—anyway, that’s another subject.

SB: Well, let’s go back to Halifax here. It’s this really, open, you could call it, really wide country part of England. How would you describe Halifax?

JP: Well, the Pennines are treeless, so there are expanses outside the town. Halifax is in a bowl of these hills. It’s nineteenth century, and it’s all Yorkstone, the floors, walls, and ceiling of the buildings, the tiles. It has a uniform material and color. It’s very earthy and the people are down to earth, and it was the center of the Industrial Revolution.

SB: Right. Both your parents came from these textile families.

JP: Yeah, yeah. It was all about having the water, originally, to power the mills.

SB: What are some of the earliest memories that stick in your mind from Halifax?

JP: Well, the house that we lived in was nice because my bedroom was at the top of the stairs, so you could smell breakfast being made. I had four sisters. There was always action; there was always stuff going on. And Dad going to work and Mum…. We had lots of animals and things like that. So it was a very pleasant upbringing, with hindsight. 

Yorkshire itself is— I think I said that before because you’re not in a metropolis. It is much quieter in every respect. You don’t go out because there’s nowhere to go out to. So you eat at home, your entertainment’s at home, and it’s a very quiet life.

SB: It’s a certain silence.

JP: Yes. It made me want to eventually get to a metropolis, but it took me a long time.

SB: There’s this beautiful photograph that you put in Minimum, in the book, by Bill Brandt, this sort of luminous image of the cobbled streets of Halifax. It’s this beautiful image. And looking at it, the way material is treated almost, I see your work in it, somehow.

JP: Oh, yeah. Halifax is—I’ve got to be careful what I say—but it has had more influence than Japan, really. It’s what started it all. But, of course, the Bill Brandt photograph is not the reality. It was a tough life that he was depicting. A lot of poverty, very low incomes, and a lot of time in the mill—and the noise. The Crossley’s Carpet Mill, where my swimming teacher worked, you went to collect him to go to the swimming pool, and he’d open the side door of the factory. Even though there were probably several doors between you and the machine room, the noise was deafening. And I was in the car. I wasn’t in the machine room. The photograph is beautiful, but the life there was tough.

SB: You left home early, at age 7, for boarding school?

JP: Yeah, yeah. That’s what you did, sort of middle class.

SB: I read that you were particularly passionate about your racing bike—more so maybe than school.

JP: [Laughs] Yeah. They never understood that, of course, on a racing bike, you could cover big distances. They thought a bike was to go to the end of the drive. I don’t think they realized.

SB: So where would you go on your racing bike?

JP: Well, at the early school, I would just go into the countryside. But when I went to school down south I was able to go to towns and get around a bit.

SB: At boarding school, I also read, that you acquired a drum kit. 

JP: [Laughs]

SB: Do you have any drumming memories?

JP: Well, they took it away immediately. The drum teacher said, “Oh, you can practice on the book covers.” So you were going like this [mimes drumming] on the book cover. They actually took the books away. Can you believe that? It’s just idiotic. It’s true I was still making an irritating noise, but I wasn’t a very good drummer anyway.

SB: Well, you’re creating a different kind of rhythm with architecture, right?

JP: Yeah, rhythm is an important word in architecture.

SB: When did architecture and design enter the picture for you? You came across an issue of Domus at some point. Did you ever have dreams of becoming an architect when you were younger?

JP: Definitely early on I was interested in what rooms were like, and the atmosphere, and I had ideas of creating a shop or an interior of something that you would use that was accessible to the public in a minor way, like a shop. So I must’ve embedded early. Dad was always poring over plans for extensions to the factory and things like that, and building. He built a really extravagant orangery in the garden. That was really pretty. There was always an architect in the kitchen, but Dad thought that you worked with architects rather than be one yourself. But it’s interesting because he loved puttering around with plans, so I think he would like to have been one, but he just didn’t think you did that.

SB: We talked all about Japan before, which was sort of what happened next. The period which followed you spending six years working with your father in the family business. You headed to Japan, and then, eventually, in 1978 you came home. That’s really when you turned to architecture, right? At that point, you kind of realized—

JP: There was nothing else to do there. [Laughter]

SB: Better figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

JP: [Laughs] Yeah. I had quite a lot of false starts. It’s funny, I never worried. My parents obviously worried. They said, “You won’t be happy unless you’ve got a job,” which is slightly true, but I wasn’t in any hurry to do anything, particularly. I just kept trying things. And it was just amazing when somehow architecture seemed to work.

SB: Do you think that somehow was to your advantage that you were, at least relatively speaking, late to the game? That you had had this time to live?

JP: Definitely. A hundred percent. Because I was in my early thirties and still at school. So I had ten years of experiencing architecture physically, and also the travel, and living in different countries. It’s a mature person’s game, I think. You put up a building, it’s there for a long time, normally—or can be.

SB: Yeah. Most architects, probably rightly, it takes decades, if ever, before you’re getting a major public commission or—

JP: Yeah. Yeah. Because this place is six hundred years old, or whatever.

SB: We’re sitting in six hundred years of history. [Laughter]

JP: Well, I was determined to know everything about it and to take all the stones, so I know every—

SB: You hired photographers to come and photograph every inch, right?

JP: Yeah. Different ones, as well.

SB: Didn’t you bring a sound recordist here to record the sounds?

JP: Yeah, but the sounds that you and I hear— But he went off on a complete tangent and he recorded sounds that the human ear can’t. So I don’t know quite how I’m supposed to hear them. I think maybe we should ask how you—

SB: Yeah, Johnny [Simon] probably knows. We can ask our sound engineer.

JP: Yeah. It’s just interesting. I slightly got put off by that because I should’ve got somebody else to do the birdsong. They’re beautiful as well. And also the sound of the fish in the pond.

SB: Well, wasn’t one of your construction workers an ornithologist himself?

JP: Yeah, but he was doing it for himself. [Laughs] He recorded fifty-six birds. He showed me his notebook. I should have bought it or something. I was a bit conscious that he clearly, obviously, wasn’t doing any building work. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: But it’s nice because also the wildlife. We had a snake, the foxes obviously, and the heron comes to fish. And the badger.

SB: Well, I think this project—again, talk about waiting. You didn’t do this project early in your career. You did this after thirty, forty years. What impact do you think that time had on what you brought to this?

JP: Well, certain things get easier, but I still think I was keen, almost as soon as we’d finished this, to get onto the next one for the family. But that was vetoed—or it certainly wasn’t encouraged. Because we were very busy in the office. I think I wasn’t careful enough with allocating a team to do it. I thought I could do it myself and get by, which is classic not taking your own advice. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: So it took a bit longer. If I go back, every project we’ve done has been seen. It’s been published, or it’s—

SB: Yeah, even Elvaston Place, your first apartment, there was this World of Interiors issue with an infamous photograph of the kitchen. This very spare, minimalist kitchen with this big red steak on the countertop.

JP: Yeah. You have to indulge the photographer, I guess. You don’t have much control, especially at that age. I tried. It didn’t seem to me, but—

SB: Well, the “minimalist” label was already there because the headline of that story is “Bare Minimum: John Pawson’s London Flat Takes Understatement to the Verge of Painful Silence.” [Laughter]

JP: Yeah. Well, you can’t keep a good journalist down [Pawson’s dog, Lochie, barks], but yeah.

SB: There’s the dog. [Laughs]

JP: Yeah.

SB: Tell me about Neuendorf House, this house in Mallorca that you did with Claudio Silvestrin. Really a remarkable thing, as you were sort of alluding to, in that it really hasn’t changed in the nearly forty years since it was completed.

JP: Not a thing, no—I was there recently—which is fantastic. That was, again, a very fortuitous meeting, and he was very generous to give us a go at designing the house. It was our first house and very nearly the first project. Certainly the first project in the round.

SB: It’s sort of become iconic, I would say. I don’t use that word very often with architecture, but there is a sort of iconography to that house. Maybe even in the way—this might be a bit hyperbolic—but it’s like the way that Casa Malaparte has captured the imagination in this really—

JP: Exactly.

SB: There’s something.

JP: It’s more than itself in a way. We were conscious, when we were doing it, that you try and approach it very logically. Claudio and I sat down, and we were in this hotel with a garden in Palma, and we didn’t want a typical house with windows and the front door, and things like that. We wanted to hide that. The courtyard approach helped a lot with that. The thing is, we didn’t know about Barragán, which is hard to believe when you look at it. We knew a lot about Mies [van der Rohe], but it wasn’t really appropriate there.

SB: Right, I read that you went to see his Barcelona Pavilion while you were working on the house.

JP: But it doesn’t show. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: We just tried to approach it very, very logically. As I said, we had a lot of time on our hands. Then, while it was being constructed, I was having problems with my relationship with Hester [van Royen, Pawson’s first wife] and that was very distracting from the work. Claudio did most of this on-site supervision for the house, whereas certain decisions were made, like the position of the benches and things like that.

But it’s very nice going back, which I’ve done quite often recently, because it’s just the same. But normally you don’t get to enjoy a project you’ve done for somebody else. That’s why it’s important for me to do our own house.

SB: Are there other projects of yours you go back to frequently?

JP: Well, I’ll go to the monastery, a different experience. And obviously, these places that we’re redoing now, with different owners, we’re going back to that. But no.…

SB: The Design Museum in London, maybe?

JP: Yeah, public buildings, yeah. People used to think that I would go to all these houses that I’d built. But clients don’t just say, “Hey, come anytime you want. Just drop by. Don’t need to tell us. There’s an open house. Show your friends.” 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: It’s private. Also, it’s very interesting [dog barks], handover day: One minute, you’re the boss of the site and what you say goes, and you have this thing, and then it’s the client’s, and you have to knock on the door and you may not be allowed in. Whereas, the day before you were— [dog whimpering]

SB: We might need to open the door for the dog.

[Long pause while the door is opened for Lochie]

SB: I don’t even remember where we were.

JP: We were talking about sex. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: That’s another thing, actually, that you don’t do as well in architecture.

SB: Sex?

JP: There was a Dutch woman who was trying to do a book about sex and architecture and came to see me in the office. It was very difficult to explain to her that it wouldn’t be something that I would do because I didn’t think…. They’re very separate things. 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: Sorry, I know. Digressing now. No, just like you can’t bring humor into design or architecture, you don’t design a place and say, “Oh, this is sexy.” You might find it—Farnsworth House or something—but it’s not.…

SB: Yeah. The only example I can think of is the Philip Johnson Brick House, where he designed a room that…. I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright called his “fuck studio.”

JP: He had a way with words. [Laughter]

SB: Let’s turn to your Notting Hill home, which you mentioned earlier—late nineties. How do you think about the life of that project? Obviously, a more intimate space than the home farm that’s here because of the limitations of being in London.

JP: Yeah, it’s very, very different, but it’s very nice. It was interesting because we’re on a communal garden, which is a nice London thing. Forty houses back onto the same park and it’s secure and private, but you have this space which you can share. The tap for that—the garden tap—had lead pipes, and it had been leaking for nine months, they reckon. It had very slowly got down the garden, but it had found our lower ground floor. It had found it, exclusively, so the water for nine months ended up coming up through our kitchen floor. We had to completely redo the house. The insurance company was very good, although it’s not the same. So we had to redo the house, but I kept thinking, “Well, what should I do? Is there something that I would want to change?” And I didn’t.

SB: When was this?

JP: Recently. Like, a year ago.

SB: Oh, wow.

JP: Yeah. It took about a year to do it. I was all for renting somewhere fancy. Catherine put her foot down, so we sort of camped with friends, borrowed things.

SB: In a way, it’s a restoration of a work that you did in your lifetime. Which is interesting.

JP: Yeah. You look, can we get the same effect, but better mechanics or whatever? In the end, it’s identical, but it’s nice to be back in. Because we’re half the time here and half the time there, and when we arrive here, we think, “Oh, how nice it is to be here,” and then we go back to London, we say, “Oh, how nice is this to be back in London.” [Laughs]

SB: Well, just to play off your cookbook statement earlier, when I think about that house, and I think about this house—which, this house has three kitchens, that house has one, but one very prominent kitchen. [Laughs] A trademark kitchen, even, that extends into the backyard in this beautiful way.

JP: Yeah, I just wanted the work talk to keep going. We have a small backyard, and it’s a way of dealing with all the stuff that you need in the backyard. But because it goes through a glass wall. It’s seventeen meters long.

SB: That might be one of the most famous private kitchens in the world. [Laughter]

JP: Because Catherine, sometime ago, I think in 2015 or so, said, “You should be doing this Instagram thing.” I said, “Well, that’s not for me.” She said, “Yes, definitely it is for you.” Then she got Caius, my son, to set the account up. She posted the first picture herself. Of course, I didn’t like it, so I took it down. I had to put something else up. But the kitchen in London is usually the most popular post. Even now, if I post it with a teacup or something.…

SB: Yeah. The algorithm likes the Pawson kitchen in London.

JP: Yeah. [Laughter]

SB: Another project that I feel like, if we’re talking about time, is so essential to bring up here is the Feuerle Collection in Berlin. It is a literal temporal experience to go there. Maybe we could walk the listeners through what it’s like because it’s this incredible structure. It’s a pair of former telecommunications bunkers that are linked underground. It’s a timed experience.

JP: Yeah, well, it was built in the early forties during the war, as you said, to run the railway network. But it was bombproof. The ceiling and the walls are 3.8 meters thick. The doorways are chicane, so that they’re blast-proof, and so are the air vents on the ceiling. So it’s a massive…. And also, the shuttering for the concrete is really beautiful and it’s very precise, everything. But it’s one story above ground. And I think two below, although we only use one story because the third one is already below the canal, which is next door.

SB: Yeah, and visitors enter by coming down into this space. The first room you enter is pitch black. You stay there for, I think it’s around two minutes, in—

JP: Might seem like two hours, yes.

SB: Yeah, in the pitch black.

JP: Yeah. With others, as well.

SB: With others, with a group of maybe thirty, forty? And it’s a John Cage track.

JP: Yeah. Two minutes of silence. It’s funny how people try and resist that. It is like, “Oh, I don’t need to do that. I just want to see the collection.” But of course, universally, and they mostly all do go through with it, and it sets you up for seeing the collection and the space and everything, because you come out of that complete darkness. They open the door at the end, and so you get a very small amount of light comes in so gradually. And then you go into the gallery and the gallery is all very, very low-lit. So things appear out of the gloom.

SB: Well, it sort of makes me think of…. that Robert Wilson thing, where it’s like, embrace the silence. Take the silence in; let the silence tell you what it wants to tell you.

JP: Well, here in the farmhouse, it’s incredibly quiet. You hear your inner workings of your body.

SB: Yeah. The barking of a dog, the—

JP: Oh, the barking of the dog. That’s an outside noise.

SB: The car on the gravel.

JP: Yes, as moments. That’s true.

SB: But a certain slowness unfolds. And I really felt that in the gallery in Berlin, too.

JP: I think that was a really good idea because, if you could, you could almost apply that to other exhibitions in a different way, to make people enjoy them more.

SB: Yeah. I think how you enter a space, sort of this idea of space and time and light unfolding.

There’s also this room in the space called the Lake Room that I wanted to bring up. Which is pretty fascinating. I know it was prompted by the flooding of this adjacent canal during the construction, but could you just share a little bit about this room? It’s quite extraordinary. It’s almost an art installation in and of itself.

JP: Well, the basement is built in the same way as the ground floor, which is massive columns and this very, very thick ceiling and floor. And you get to see the thickness because of openings and things like that. When we were working on it…. It is pretty extensive, but one of the rooms was slightly lower in relationship to the water table. That constantly had water in it when we were working. Also, obviously, there was a limit to the budget, so we decided to cut off that room completely. But it looked so nice, because they had water on the floor and it reflected the columns, so it was like those underground things, with the canals in Rome. So we just glazed it, the wall, and floodlit, and left the water there.

SB: It’s a built-in water feature.

JP: Yeah, and it’s very big.

SB: Yeah, the size of a football field.

JP: Yeah, well, certainly with the reflection.

SB: Well, intentionally, I’ve been holding back on bringing up the monks. I think this is the time to bring up the monks. [Laughter]

JP: Welcome!

SB: Let’s come into our sacred space. [Laughs] Your designs of monasteries, these date back to 1999 with your engagement with the Cistercian Trappist Order. You’ve said that monasteries are “like housing on steroids,” and in the case of the monastery of Our Lady of Nový Dvur… How do you pronounce that?

JP: You’ve done well. That’s it.

SB: Nový Dvur?

JP: It just means “new court.”

SB: Ahhh. Okay.

JP: New courtyard.

SB: In the Czech Republic, you’ve practically been building a city the past twenty-five years for these monks. Could you speak to your time there? I know you’ve spent the night many times. You’ve spent a lot of time with these monks. An even more pointed question: What has it taught you about time, being with the monks and spending time there?

JP: It is extraordinary. I come back— Of course Catherine is Catholic, so she’s all in favor of me going—and going herself. But she hasn’t been as often as I have. Every time I think, why don’t I go more? Because it is, you feel…. It’s isolated. It’s in the countryside, but it’s incredibly quiet and peaceful. They are such a good example of— They’re happy. They look at peace. Their faces don’t have the lines that we do, and the stress. 

I did a week with them and everything just dropped away. But they have a very ordered life. They get up at the same time, and go to bed at the same time, and have their meals at the same time, and have eight services a day, and they have a half a day in study and half in manual work and so on. Every minute is sorted and healthy.

Of course, a monk’s life is very different from our lives. Very few people get the calling, and even people who get the calling, and go and enter the monastery, don’t necessarily stay forever. It takes like ten years to become a monk. So there’s a safety net, so to speak, for them. Theirs is a very different life because it’s no work, therefore no competition. Or there’s no talking, so there’s no argument. And of course, there’s no sex. If you successfully take away that and the other things, then you have a very unstressful life, so you can concentrate on God and on the routine. Obviously, people do go for a couple of weeks a year to other places in America, or other Cistercian or Benedictine.

SB: Yep. I talked about that with Pico Iyer on the podcast.

JP: Also, it’s all designed by us.

SB: Right. Maybe run the listeners through your experience. 

JP: [Laughs]

SB: What all have you designed?

JP: As you said—well, they call them “cities.” It’s a monastic city, and the forty or so monks never leave, so the grounds, and the buildings in the grounds, and the whole city has to be well thought-out and has to be extensive enough for them to be comfortable never leaving. Obviously, the church is the center of everything. That’s where they spend eight services a day. They get there through the cloister. So they gather in the cowl room, put on the cowl, go down the cloister to the church, and then come back and do the same. And then they go in procession to the meals of the day.

SB: And you’ve created all these spaces?

JP: All these spaces, and then the knives and forks would—

SB: The industrial spaces.

JP: All that stuff. Yeah, all that was designed for them. So you have the school, you have the hospital, you have the workshops, the factory, and obviously the farm buildings.

SB: Are you working on anything for them right now?

JP: Yeah, they liked some of these things, it became a bit popular with visitors. So they found too many people in the back of the church is distracting. So we’ve built a church for visitors. There are plenty of chapels so if their parents come or their brother or something, they can have mass for them in a private chapel. But they wanted somewhere bigger.

SB: You’ve also worked on a monastery in Burgundy; a basilica in Hungary; the St. Moritz church in Augsburg, Germany; and a chapel in Dillingen, Germany—this wood chapel. What do you make of all this other ecclesiastical work?

JP: It’s funny—I’m not being facetious—but I do sometimes forget what I’ve done. Also, we did a Church of England, we did an Anglican church in St. John’s in Hackney, a big church.

SB: And you did that project with Swarovski, this reflective mirrored—

JP: Oh yeah, yeah. That was in St. Paul’s, as well.

SB: Which traveled. Yeah, that was in St. Paul’s.

JP: Yeah, no, no. Our ecclesiastical side.

SB: Yeah. What is it about your practice, do you think, that these clients find so appealing?

JP: Well, I think it’s.… Obviously, you have to be careful with this story, but the Cistercian monks wrote to me. They were the first to get in touch and said they’d seen the Calvin Klein store, and they thought it would make a good church.

SB: Which Paul [Goldberger] alluded to in his piece—the foreshadowing.

JP: Yeah. It’s weird. But what they were meaning is, they had actually seen it in a book and the tables in the store were like altars. They could see the Calvin Klein store as a church. It didn’t matter for them what was sold in it—underpants or whatever. People thought there was some contradiction with monks and Calvin, but the monks saw the practical side.

The other ones saw the church that we did for the monks. But the funny thing is, I tried to explain to some of them, the one in Hungary, that you can’t take a Roman church that’s had a thousand years of work done in it, and turn it into a minimal twenty-first-century church without upsetting a few people. So there was a lot of argument, because they wanted me to take everything out, all the historical things. But I think the first monks were looking for somebody who got it, who understood what they wanted. They weren’t looking for necessarily a Christian or a churchgoer or a believer. They wanted somebody who understood what gave them the atmosphere in the church.

SB: In that sense, would you say there is something monkish about your practice? 

JP: You need to know what’s appropriate, I think. Surprisingly, there are a lot of architects doing a lot of churches, and you look at them and you just wonder why they’ve ornamented them, or put ornaments or design them as they have done, because they seem inappropriate to me. I’m not saying that they have to be minimal, but just things put in for the sake of them. Decoration, I suppose you would call it. 

SB: Kitsch. 

JP: Well, it could be kitsch, but even just stuff you don’t need can make it look different. Or shape or weird shapes. There are an awful lot of churches that are a bit weird.

SB: Well, this connects us where I want to end, which is that I think your work, at its heart, is about—and this is going back, full circle, to your Minimal book, which I just keep bringing up.

JP: Please. Available in every good bookshop.

SB: [Laughs] You talk about this notion of the “excitement of empty space,” which I think is—actually, it’s what Pico Iyer, when I interviewed him, described as “thrumming silence.” I was hoping maybe—could you wax here just for a minute or two on emptiness and the importance of boiling things down to the essential? Because I guess in this world that’s full of so much noise or ornament, architectural or otherwise….

JP: Well, I think the thing about excitement.

SB: Mhmm.

JP: Some people may think it a bit weird to be so excited by an empty space. [Laughter] But if you visit Le Thoronet abbey in the South of France, and you go into the church there, from the quite bright sunlight into this very calm, very cool space—and I went in with, at the time I think he was 6 or 7, my son. It was fascinating to watch, even in that low light, how affected he was by the space and the silence in a really positive way. He took it on board immediately. It clearly made him feel good, and he just wanted to express himself. It was really nice to watch. And it was very funny because somebody told him to shut up. There were two other people there, and the other adult that was there told him to behave himself—the one that had told my son off. Because clearly the whole point is to express yourself and to feel the space and feel the.… I was really pleased because I was trying to respect the man that was upset by it. But actually, the [other] man said, “Don’t be ridiculous. He should express himself.”

SB: Well, you’ve said, “If you are not affected when you walk into a building, then I don’t think it’s architecture.”

JP: You’re right. Absolutely. Le Thoronet is architecture in spades. It’s one of the best buildings in the world.

SB: Beyond its main purpose as shelter, do you think this should ultimately be the main point of architecture? That it should move us?

JP: Oh, yes. Yeah. I think we got well beyond that shelter business, really, in a way. It’s like art. There wouldn’t be life without art for us, I don’t think, culturally, as a species. You’d have to go a long way back, to be just surviving. It’s so important.

Architecture is architecture. I’m not saying—I mean, it is an art, but it’s not fine art. I’m talking about fine art that you need. Plus a bit of architecture. [Laughter] You need more architecture. Don’t forget architecture! You see I’m doing myself out of a job. Just have a painting. 

I have a school friend who—we have lunch from time to time—and he went to university, he’s intellectually much more off than I have. We were just talking, but he hadn’t heard of [Pieter Jansz.] Saenredam. I said, “Oh, well, he’s a seventeenth-century Dutch church painter; you should look at it.” Every time I see him now, he says, “Oh, I saw a Saenredam in Holland.” Or “I saw the one in Glasgow at the museum.” It’s great. It’s really nice that somebody who is so knowledgeable and used to take tours in Rome of the architecture, that I can introduce him to something.

SB: I think you had a painting [by Saenredam] in your Minimal book.

JP: [Laughter] I did indeed. He could have read that. Friends don’t necessarily read your books, do they? Did they read yours?

SB: They congratulate me on the book. [Laughter]

JP: Because you gave them one. [Laughter]

SB: But I guess just to finish—and on that point—do you see your work in this much longer arc of history? Do you see yourself in relation, the things you make, to something like Katsura in Kyoto or one of these paintings you were just talking about?

JP: Wow. No, I don’t. As I said, I’ve never thought about legacy or permanence. I’ve certainly tried to do my very, very best to make them as special as possible. And there aren’t that many of them. There’s four hundred actual design things in forty years or something like that—forty-five years. Maybe they’ve had an influence on some people, but I think it’s very difficult to say. It hasn’t been important to me, that. Therefore, it certainly hasn’t affected the way I design or think or…. Somebody sitting here in five hundred years saying, “Well, there was this chap in 2021 or 2025 or something.…” [Laughter]

SB: Brought together this hodgepodge of buildings. [Laughter]

JP: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

SB: Well, I think it’s safe to say this space will still be here in five hundred years. I guess it’s more a curiosity if humanity will.

JP: I know. Yeah. Gosh, there’s some bleak talk out there, isn’t there, about the way we’re heading.

SB: Yeah. But we should end on a hopeful note.

JP: Yes! I am an optimist.

SB: Yeah. Where are you finding hope? What excites you about the future, John?

JP: That’s a good thought, isn’t it? The obvious things, the major advances in medicine—but then sometimes you worry about keeping us all alive for a lot longer. Or comfort. I don’t get the population thing. It’s still increasing so much, but on the other hand there are certain countries that need to produce more people. I like to avoid this one, I think.

SB: I said “hope,” John.

JP: Hope. Yeah. We’ll get there. We’ll get there, won’t we? We always have. There’ll be some way of a solution to using up all our resources. [Pauses] Yeah. I wonder if we—I wonder if I—avoid thinking about it. I wonder if it’s a technique. It’s pretty good here, though.

SB: I’m letting the silence sit. [Laughter] Any final words?

JP: I thought the silence was rather good, actually. I think I’ve told you this story before. But finally, after years, I got to my favorite building, Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe. I knew the owner [Peter Palumbo], and I was let in by the housekeeper or the person that looked after it. It wasn’t occupied. She was a young college girl, and very excitable and was talking a lot. It was the first time I’d ever been there. I’d entered into the space. It was really quiet out there, except for you could hear the river. I suddenly thought, I said to her, “Why don’t we have a minute’s silence in memory of Mies?” Because the talking was driving me nuts. Which is a bit unfair because she was a really nice person and was just trying to help. Anyway, she was so competitive that I didn’t last. She kept going for ten minutes. So I broke the silence after ten minutes. [Long pause]

SB: I bet our listeners are like, “Are they still there?” [Laughs]

JP: Is anyone there? Is anyone there? 

SB: [Laughs]

JP: It’s really nice though, isn’t it?

SB: It’s great. It’s so great.

JP: That could be the new podcast, actually. Sixty minutes of no John Pawson. [Laughter]

SB: All right, let’s end there.

JP: Yeah. Well, thank you very much for listening.

SB: Thank you, John. This is the great, dry British wit of John Pawson that I love. That’s a great place to end.

JP: Oh, dear.

This interview was recorded at John Pawson’s Home Farm in the Oxfordshire countryside of England on March 28, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, Kylie McConville, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak based on a photograph by Gilbert McCarragher.