John Pawson has been making rigorously simple architecture for over forty years that speaks of the fundamental, but also of a modest character. His work spans a wide range of scales and typologies, from private homes, sacred commissions, galleries, museums, hotels, ballet stages, yacht interiors and a bridge over a lake.

Just as Alvar Aalto’s bronze doorknob has been characterised as the ‘handshake of a building’, a defining aspect of Pawson’s work is the sense of engaging with the essence of a philosophy of space through everything the eye sees or the hand touches. His method is to approach buildings and design commissions in precisely the same way, on the basis that “everything is architecture”.

Whether on the scale of a monastery, a house, a pan or a ballet, everything can be traced back to a coherent set of concerns with mass, volume, surface, proportion, union, geometry, repetition, light and ritual. In this way, even something as modest as a fork can become a vehicle for much broader ideas about how we live and what we value.