Minimal
The Pawson book is called Minimal.
To answer Whitespike's question, I guess cooking is a good metaphor. A french cook once said "I could put the mushrooms in a cream sauce, but who am I to change what the mushrooms taste like? Instead I put only a dash of lemon juice - which brings out more of their natural flavor. A mushroom should taste like a mushroom."
Minimalism - in any context: art, architecture, design, etc - is about restraint, balance, emphasis, and understanding materials. Pawson's work is beautiful because he truly understands how the massing of his buildings relate to their environments, and how the occupants relate to the internal voids.
A good example of bad minimalism is Kanye West's new apartment in NY (see link). No balance between what's white and what isnt - your eyes have to strain to define every object and space.
http://www.dezeen.com/2007/01/22/more-images-of-kanye-west-apartment/
All I see
when I see 'minimalist' interiors is places to put stuff 🙂
But getting back to the thread title:
My father was a builder/ developer and I sort of grew up with design
I drew plans and built Lego and Bayko houses from an early age
I went to college to study Interior Design
(which was partnered with a 3D course.. Matthew Hilton was there, amongst others)
I found the Interior Design course deathly boring, so transferred to the Fashion Design course..
they seemed to be having much more fun..
azure
I assure you I wasn't attacking him ... I was questioning minimalism. Especially contemporary minimalism. Perhaps I shouldn't have opened that can of worms. I just don't see the human benefit in minimalism in pure form .... variations sure. We could all benefit from unloading some shit and canning the general population's more is more attitude. That being said, I think his work is pretty.
Interesting that the designer...
Interesting that the designer of the Kanye West apartment (Claudio Silvestrin) was at one time the professional partner of John Pawson, so you'd expect their minimalist visions to be somewhat aligned. But I agree, the West building is just a bland formless whole, whereas John Pawson's stuff usually contains just enough detail (and contrast) to hold your attention.
early influences
as a young kid i fancied drawing environments and cartoons. i was a big fan of automobile design and spent a pile of time building model cars from kits. detail was extremely important as i used sewing thread to represent wires in the engine compartment.
whatever time i wasn't playing sports or roaming the neighborhood i spent in my dad's workshop building things, taking stuff apart, and mostly learning how to use tools.
my soda pop bottle collection was an early fascination with packaging design; "fun" for me on a family vacation meant finding a grocery store so i could rummage through their returned bottle bins, seeking out previously undiscovered brands and setting them aside for purchase. [i had to get comfortable with the puzzled looks from store clerks who couldn't quite figure out why i wanted to actually "buy" empty bottles.]
like many young boys, i was also intrigued with "body design." this aesthetic appreciation was pursued at the local corner drugstore where the glossies of loveliness were right among the "mad" magazines which seemed to hold almost an equal interest for me. [almost.]
my good grades in school were always from my art and shop [industrial arts] classes. those familiar classrooms were like home to me; i couldn't seem to get enough.
these are just some of my earlier influences. the formative years are so ... well, formative!
I had a good friend
from my home town (Minneapolis) who I met originally in San Francisco. When he moved back to Minneapolis in 1972, I started going to estate sales and house sales with him, and started to appreciate the stuff he was fond of (I remember going to a house in a suburb of Minneapolis with him and he found an entire living room suite of furniture by Robsjohn-Gibbings for Widdicomb AND the pair of Paul Frankl art deco lamps - one of which is pictured in the wonderful book "Landmark Designs of the 20th. Century")
John moved to New York, and I followed a year later and he was really advanced in 1979-1980 at the beginning of the collecting of mid-century modern furniture.
Between 1980 and his death in 1993, he found tons of rare pieces around the New York second hand and junk shops; a Nelson desk, a suite of Braniff furniture by Alexander Girard, plastic McCobb chairs, a Nelson sideboard, a Kagan stool, and tons of other pieces.
He was great influence on me.
I doodled too much too!
I can relate to whitespike, as I too, was banned from using more paper. I drew weird contructions that would have never been structurally possible, but they all had one thing in common...a huge white bed in the middle of a big white room. Funny that my later tastes in design revolved around color. However, a minimal white room will still make me swoon. I love Pawson's work it's so ethereal and sublime. Sadly it's just not livable. Adding the morning paper and a coffee cup ruins the whole aesthetic!
I have definitely progressed through several phases of design taste before settling on modernism. Each style that I tried on for a fit always seemed to have too much going on. Too much decor, too much ornimentation, too much pattern, too much something. In the end I have come back to simplicity. Give me a clean line any day!
No offense intended to those of faith, but...
having been raised with outhe benefit of religion, I'm repeatedly glad that of that fact. In my personal experience it seems that any holy book seems to be 'interpreted' to fit within the beliefs and prejudices of the reader. So no wonder a nude pregnant angel went over like a lead balloon! Now....back to nattering on about design...
Yes Please ! 😉
I wandered the streets looking for vacant lots...
I would take precise measurements and go home and draw plans for the (proposed) house
I surprisingly never got arrested.. I was only 12, and armed only with a tape measure..but must have looked weird.
The stranger the plot, the better...the more sloping, wedge shaped ..the finer the challenge
I can not go back to a moment...
..when I discovered that I could draw or model clay or do anything close to what would become my career as a designer. Compared to most other boys in my class I could not draw and I was not very handy either. The place I called home had been severely damaged by American bombers and although we survived, thousands of others did not. The schools were flattened, the church destroyed, the hospital and hundreds of homes were all turned to rubble. To grow up in this mess was to keep longing first for the most basic things, later on for this Utopia that was regularly evoked around the dinner table?.Before the war we had this and before the war there was that and you could do this and that with it?But for those of us who started during the war had to pull wall paper off the walls of bombed houses in order to have paper in school, all of that pre-war luxury was something you could not even imagine. So re-building, making some contribution in making things normal again seemed the most obvious ambition one could have. My father was a cabinet maker and I learned quite early that drawing seem to be an essential part of what you need in order to make something and so I asked my 2de grade teacher to teach me how to draw. Somehow he was not discouraged by the early results and he kept giving me assignments. I have drawn ever since and I have learned to hide that I have no talent in that direction at all. I must have been twelve or so when I joined my father to a conference on design. Oh no, this was nothing fancy, just a little camping table with a teakettle, some glasses and some cutlery in front of the twenty five people that had shown up for an evening of popular education as it was called at the local library. Two gentlemen were taking turns in introducing to the audience the qualities of those simple objects. It was then and there that I decided that this would be my role in life. So, in my case, to design objects was not a choice inspired by talent but by the conviction that products could turn our lives around and pull us out of the rubble by providing us with what was so urgently needed, but do it intelligently and with grace. Although the examples they used were not Danish, my father received Mobilia, an outstanding Danish magazine. For many years it was my best source of information and the standard by which I measured everything. Years later a well known Danish design critic would write in one of the Danish newspapers that I was the most Danish of the non Danish designers. I think that I was happier about that than about having a product in the permanent collection of the MoMA, or any other honor prior to receiving the Henry Van de Velde Award a few years ago.
I got to know both gentlemen quite well. I had both of them as my teachers at the design academy in Eindhoven Holland, and one of them became the founder of the school of Industrial design at Carleton University in Ottawa.
Ford beating Ferrari at Le Mans...
with a car that did not "look" as fast, or as sexy, hooked me. I was very young. My brother and I stayed up all night listening to radio updates of the 24 hour race. Most Americans then doubted Americans could win Le Mans. The Ferraris were just too sophisticated. Since that time the shape of everything, and the construction underneath, has fascinated me.
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