The Sacred and the Profane

The Fondazione Bisazza stages a dual event: it is currently the Italian venue of John Pawson: Plain Spaces, while simultaneously displaying the foundation's inspired installations.

The sacred and the profane face each other in the rooms of the Fondazione Bisazza, in Montecchio. On the one hand, visitors are greeted by the restrained John Pawson: Plain Spaces exhibition; on the other, they are abruptly faced with a procession of inspired installations. Clad in a multicoloured mosaic skin, these are giant figures created for Bisazza by Alessandro Mendini, Marcel Wanders, Jaime Hayon, Patricia Urquiola, Fabio Novembre, Studio Job and the late Ettore Sottsass, plus two mosaics by Sandro Chia and Mimmo Paladino. These two approaches create a fascinating mix that inaugurates the spaces of the Vincenza foundation directed by Maria Cristina Didero.

On the one hand, I expect the Mad Hatter from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to pop out any moment. On the other, Pawson's architecture reveals itself for what it is — no ifs and no buts. Which way to go? Where to stop? I can even decide not to choose and flit merrily back and forth from one wing to the other, well aware that fate is on my side. I had wanted to see the exhibition at London's Design Museum — where Plain Spaces originated under the guidance of Deyan Sudjic —, but that was not to be. Another thought: the exhibition is a starting point, an invitation to actually visit the buildings shown and physically touch the British architect's capability to sculpt space with light and highlight multiple shades of white. After all, things never are what they seem, and the apparent simplicity that transpires from his works is paradoxically the product of a complex process.

We ought to fight digital dematerialisation and start travelling again, perhaps in the footsteps of Bruce Chatwin who was Pawson's first, and most famous client. In his 1986 story A Place to Hang Your Hat, published posthumously in 1996 in Anatomy of Restlessness, Chatwin describes how he went into "a room designed by a young architect called John Pawson, and knew at once, 'This is what I definitely want'". In 1982 the English writer, who died prematurely in 1989, appointed Pawson to refurbish a studio apartment in Belgravia, requesting a domestic space that was "a cross between a cell and a ship's cabin."

Top and above: <em>John Pawson – Plain Spaces</em>, the inaugural exhibition of the Fondazione Bisazza in Montecchio, Vicenza. Photos by Andrea Resmini — Top and above: *John Pawson – Plain Spaces*, the inaugural exhibition of the Fondazione Bisazza in Montecchio, Vicenza. Photos by Andrea Resmini

Such a project may seem a trivial job, presenting limited difficulties and proportions, but Chatwin discovered that the result was exactly what he needed. Pawson had suceeded, blurring the physical boundaries of a tiny space. On this point, the writer who confesses to a "horror of home" could only be grateful: "I came back from Africa a few months later to find an airy, well proportioned room, rather like certain rooms in early Renaissance paintings, small in themselves but with vistas that give an illusion of limitless space." Limitless space is what we all need. Pawson's methods possess a dual essence: they are simple, spare and reduced to the minimum but involve a complex, difficult and precise execution process.

Model of the Schrager Penthouse, New York. Photo by Andrea Resmini

Pawson, for example, models space so that "there is something to look at, a garden, a corridor or even the room next door." He favours the physicality of architecture: "I usually build thick walls and let the doorways reveal their thickness. It is a matter of substance; passing through a thick wall can be a great experience." His favourite materials are natural ones — uninterrupted slabs of marble; wood floors with planks that run uninterrupted through the space; walls developed in multiple shades of white when common sense can only imagine the existence of one; stairs that seem to vanish into thin air, with risers and treads the same size.

John Pawson: Plain Spaces is not a cerebral exhibition, but a narration conveyed with honesty, for everyone

The room showing the video of the <em>Chroma</em> dance. Pawson designed the set for the Royal Opera House, London, 2006. Photo by Andrea Resmini — The room showing the video of the *Chroma* dance. Pawson designed the set for the Royal Opera House, London, 2006. Photo by Andrea Resmini

John Pawson: Plain Spaces is not a cerebral exhibition, but a narration conveyed with honesty, for everyone, featuring a sequence of small, medium-sized and large models that ends in a scale 1:1 installation (clad with Bisazza mosaics). Pawson explains that he studied at Eton College and then came to architecture in Shiro Kuramata's office; and that he attended the Architectural Association in London without graduating (this is Veneto, the home of Carlo Scarpa who did not have a degree). He shows letters received from Bruce Chatwin and Karl Lagerfeld as well as faxes from the prior of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic. This enlightened abbot commissioned him to build a new Cistercian monastery after seeing pictures of the Calvin Klein shop in New York.

1:1Site-specific installation. Photo by Andrea Resmini

On the wall, Pawson has hung large photographs of the Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens, his London house, the Martyrs Pavilion in Oxford, Baron House in Skane, in Sweden, and the Novy Dvur monastery. The pictures have a perfect resolution and even the tiniest detail is well defined. They come from a collage of 92 partial shots, painstakingly assembled by the German photographer Jens Weber.

Pawson's architecture is certainly spare and shuns the ephemeral. Deyan Sudjic says that he does not pursue "a social programme but a personal one. He offers no utopian recipes." He does, however, have his own ethical dimension. Pawson believes objects — whether buildings or saucepans — must "help us reorder the chaos we live in". They must be designed to go against rampant consumerism and help us do without the unnecessary. Laura Bossi