John Pawson: The Minimal Home

The latest volume in Phaidon's long record of John Pawson's work turns to the house — what a home really needs, and how the architect behind some of the most rigorously simple spaces of the last forty years approaches it. Where his earlier book Minimum looked at simplicity across art, architecture, and design, The Minimal Home narrows the focus to how buildings shape the way we live day to day.

The book is organized into six chapters, one for each domestic activity: living, cooking, eating, bathing, sleeping, and working. Each pairs Pawson's own residential projects, from the 1980s to today, with the precedents and personal references behind them — Japanese hot springs, Donald Judd's home in Marfa, the Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet in Provence, and Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House among them. Deyan Sudjic, emeritus director of London's Design Museum, contributes commentary on the domestic interior, alongside six texts by Pawson on his approach to making spaces that are comfortable to use, both visually and physically.