Calvin Klein's store Seoul, 1996. John Pawson, architect.
Calvin Klein's store in Seoul is, unusually, a freestanding, new building. The external elevations and entrance steps are finished in grey stone to create a smooth monolithic facade with a single, large opening. Inside, the floors are laid with the same grey stone, effectively bringing the street indoors.
Minimalist Architecture is the physical expression of a way of being: the form does not follow a particular fashion, it follows a particular life.
The only universal measure is whether the space feels comfortable and right to the people who use it. Minimalism - or, as the sculptor Donald Judd preferred to put it, the simple expression of complex thought - is only one valid response of an aesthetically diverse society, answering the needs of particular individuals and provoking debate in society at large about how we choose to live and how we expect architecture to support these choices.
I believe we have to get away from the idea of minimalism as a style and instead understand it as a way of thinking about space: its proportions, its surfaces, and the fall of light. The vision is comprehensive and seamless, a quality of space rather than forms; places, not things. This is why, in its fullest and most satisfying expression, it is not something that you can readily acquire a piece of.
I think it is important, too, to understand that minimalism is not a manifesto for spartan living. This is a recurrent misunderstanding that springs in part from its association with movements where renunciation of one sort or another is a central theme - it is unusual for a discussion of architectural simplicity not to include some reference to Zen Buddhism, the Cistercian monks or the Shakers. One may respond to the aesthetic expressions and indeed share many of the needs that these movements have sought to address without adopting particular codes of behaviour: one can want a place where it is possible to be still without necessarily wanting to pray in it.
Minimalism is not an architecture of self-denial, deprivation or absence: it is defined not by what is not there, but by the rightness of what is there and by the richness with which this is experienced.
This is definitively not about creating the architectural equivalent of the hair shirt, but about making the best possible contexts for the things that matter in life, on paring back the accretions of surface and behaviour to what is essential: the glory lies not in the act of removal, but in the experience of what is left. Profound - and pleasurable - experience is located in ordinary experience: in the taking of a shower or the preparation of food.
People tend to home in on the idea of removal, believing that it is all somehow a case of throwing out the furniture and painting the walls white. The serious thought that underlies the endeavour is missed. Real comfort is not about a large sofa; in my view, many things that look as though they should be comfortable aren't at all.
For me, comfort is synonymous with a state of total clarity where the eye, the mind and the physical body are at ease, where nothing jars or distracts. This emphasis on a quality of experience is important. Some people seem to have an idea that the only role the individual has in such spaces is the capacity to contaminate. In the sort of work that interests me, the antithesis is true: the individual is always at its heart.
We are living through a period of rapid change, which we fuel with our hunger for the latest new thing. Novelty as an end in itself is overrated. Instead of pleasure in its more profound forms, we chase distraction. We are preoccupied by ideas of the future when what we are really trying to do is make the present feel new and engaging.
In architecture, this translates into rolling programmes of refurbishment. We change everything and nothing. If our interest in the future is really the desire for a present that satisfies us - physically, visually and psychologically - can we develop perpetually interesting forms that exist outside the forces of time and fashion? This, I believe, is what the aesthetic of simplicity, with its vast and paradoxical potential for richness and sensuality, offers.
