John Pawson: Anatomy of Minimum

The fifth work in Phaidon’s documentation of Pawson’s career, Anatomy of Minimum covers the architect’s last five years of work. The projects are divided into three key themes, each explored in a chapter. The first deals with ‘study houses’, a set of projects for which the architect had a high degree of freedom to experiment, including his work on the Life House for Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture series and his own home in Gloucestershire. The second chapter focuses on repurposed structures such as the Design Museum in London, while the third looks at spiritual structures. Each contains only a handful of projects, giving scope to document them in detail through text and photography, as well as in a separate chapter containing architectural drawings of each.

There are also selections from the architect’s photographic journal — he rarely sketches — as well as a curation of his designed objects. Including a foreword by architecture writer and former head of London’s Design Museum Deyan Sudjic, the book demonstrates Pawson’s idiosyncratic approach to proportion and light, and the precise architectural language he uses from the macro to the smallest detail.