John Pawson’s career as an architect and designer spans a variety of
sizes and programmes: from bowls to bridges, and monasteries to Calvin
Klein stores. In addition to his acclaimed design work, he is the author
of Phaidon’s successful Minimum, a book that paired images and captions to illustrate the notion of simplicity in a beautiful and inspirational manner.
A Visual Inventory presents some of the images from Pawson’s
personal collection of over 230,000 digital snapshots. The book opens
with an essay explaining the importance of photography as a tool for
Pawson’s work, and the images are set one per page with illuminating
captions.
Covering a huge range of subjects, the photographs form a remarkable
body of reference material. Some of the images illustrate a particular
idea about form, material or space; others reflects the author’s
interest in returning repeatedly to certain subjects, capturing the
changes brought by different weather, light conditions, seasons and
patterns of use.
Each image has been chosen for the book because it is useful, offering a
lesson in visual thinking. None of the photographs in the book have
been cropped or altered; it is the selection, arrangement and captioning
of the images that make this book unique, valuable and attractive to
any architect, designer, artist or student who wants to see the world
around them with a stronger eye.
