Cool Bohemia
Jay Merrick
The Independent Review
18 August 2004
18 August 2004
The word ‘monastic’ is a familiar term in the modern design lexicon. But when John Pawson was asked by a Cistercian abbot to redesign a Czech monastery, the word took on a whole new meaning.Jay Merrick talks to the British minimalist about his once-in-a-lifetime commission.
Only John Pawson could have become involved in such a thing. Pawson, British architecture's master of perfectly controlled forms and vanilla interiors that don't so much appear as threaten to vanish like ice cubes in the sun. Five years ago, this ineffably courteous and diffident workaholic pulled up at a petrol station somewhere in Germany, and his four Trappist-monk passengers immediately got out and sprang into completely silent action.
"It was very funny," Pawson recalls. "I was driving them in an estate car. As soon as I pulled up, they got out. One filled up; one did the windscreen; the others did something else. The German petrol-station attendants - a frightening bunch with strange haircuts - couldn't believe it."
Nor could Pawson have quite believed what he was getting himself into a few months before that, in 1999. He had been contacted, out of the blue, by the Abbot of Sept-Fons, in Burgundy, the mother-abbey of the Cistercian order. They wanted him to reinvent the abbey in a modem manner, to rise from a physically decrepit series of buildings set in 100 acres in the Czech Republic, at Novy Dvur in Bohemia. The abbots had tried to develop a design twice: once with a monk who possessed architectural knowledge, and once with a local Czech designer. It wasn't working.
But, extraordinarily, they’d seen images of Pawson’s Calvin Klein emporium in New York, and been impressed by its secular gravitas. They'd also flicked through Minimum - “the book I wrote, or tried to write”. After making contact by letter (the first was lost in the post), a deputation of Cistercians pitched up at Pawson's office in York Way, just along from the train sheds at London's King's Cross station. "I was worried that they wouldn't give me the job, and they were worried that I wouldn't take it,” says Pawson, who desperately wanted what he refers to as "the project of a lifetime”.
There are two reasons why the prospect electrified Pawson. He is known internationally as the minimalist's minimalist; a modernist architect - via Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Luis Barragan and Le Corbusier - whose architectural substance is based on the inference of a lack of substance; or, at least, substance as texture or light, ectoplasm whose perfectly sharp corners create anomalous perspectives that seem to dissolve into literal vanishing-points. His skill has been to create singular objects, often on a domestic scale. The rambling remains at Novy Dvur would, for the first time, immerse him in a quite different order of scale.
And of purpose. Which is the second big issue for Pawson. Here, at last, was a chance to subject his architecture to its ultimate test. His buildings and interiors have always carried a hermetic, monastic-cell vibe; they are expressions of physical and psychic underload, very nearly blank slates whose textures and collusions of materials are profoundly subtle. Ultimately, Pawson creates conditions of extreme exposure. But to what, exactly?
Individuality, and an instinctive taste for seclusion and self-determination. The son of a wealthy Halifax industrialist, and of a mother of notably modest sensibility, Pawson has never quite done the obvious thing. After Eton, he wandered. “I had this childish dream,” he says. “I lost my job in the family rag-trade business, and I thought I'd go to Japan for a year and be a Zen monk and reach nirvana. My parents were non-conformists. Zen Buddhism seemed better than John Wesley. But I only stayed one night. Of course, I couldn't see the point. They say, ‘Start scrubbing the floors’, and, if you're lucky, you might get a bit of soup. I was used to explanations’.”
He got them. The failed Zen monk met and worked with the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata, who suggested that Pawson pursue architecture. He studied briefly at London's Architectural Association, but is essentially self-taught. “I'm more comfortable doing architecture and not having to talk about it - that whole AA thing of blinding people with the theory of something. That's slightly odd. But clients do seem to need reassurance, and I'm not very good at giving them that. Especially in America. The hyperbole. The ‘I'm a genius and I've had an idea that's just for you’.”
Pawson has an interestingly anomalous nature. He works very hard indeed, supported by his "more talented" team of 20 or so, and admits that, at times, he's lost to his family even when he's with them. He obviously possesses his father's determination, but not the front that went with it.The regressive tendency, the taste for quiet self-enclosure, is presumably drawn from his mother. And so there is an engrossing ambiguity in his manner and speech; an essential stillness, amplified by characteristically immaculate, pale clothing, that somehow manages to suggest both extreme obduracy and insouciant fatalism.
There was nothing insouciant about Pawson's progress at Novy Dvur, however. The drawing-board was returned to repeatedly. The Cistercians ("The abbots and prior were very sophisticated") didn't want an 18th-century pastiche abbey - but how modem could the architect get? Quite modern, ultimately, and in a way that will be perfectly familiar to Pawsonistas. But Pawson's canvas at Novy Dvur has been considerable: elements of straightforward renovation, completely new interiors, cloisters, dormitories, a new and rather beautifully sculpted chapel.
Today, five years on in the $5m project, which is still ongoing, it appears seamlessly achieved and, in places, possessed of an absolute, pellucid beauty. In some of the barrel-vaulted passages, Pawson is thrilled to have created surfaces that seem to dissolve into a condition of pure light. He may recall the words of Louis Kahn, who, in 1966, uttered this perfect little architectural haiku to the Boston Society of Architects: "Silence, with its desire to be, and Light, the giver of all presence."
But behind the finished article lay the abbey's extraordinarily detailed brief: holy-water fonts at each entrance to the church; stained glass but no colour; a heating system that would minimise dust and soot; an oculus on the east wall; enough space to kneel on a wood plank between the stalls; storage space for the chasubles and albs; one cellar for wine, beer and French cheese; "a very large table on which one can spread out the vestments". And that is but a minuscule sample from pages and pages of requirements.
This precision is hardly surprising, as the Cistercians are known for their attention to detail. They were the original hair-shirtists, the Order of Citeaux being established in the llth century to restore the literal - and severely minimal - observances of St Benedict. It was a return to the simplicity of the desert monks, who wore white habits with black scapulars and ate very little, and no meat at all. In the 17th century, these "Cistercians of the common observance" lapsed into Trappist silence. But by then, their agricultural skills had changed the productive face of northern Europe. They were the greatest farmers of medieval times. Farmers who, today, realise that both God and Calvin Klein work inmysterious ways.
The Cistercians' daily rigours threw up unexpected and charming flip-sides. Pawson speaks of the "very particular archive of memories" generated by the project: "My first experience of clients praying before the presentation of a design; and of the time when I was away on site during my wife's birthday, and the monks sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her via the telephone; and the comfort and support I was offered in the difficult days and weeks that followed a car crash in rural India when a fellow passenger - a man who was both a client and a friend - was killed."
He also talks fervently of the week he spent living as a monk at the Sept-Fons abbey. "You go to bed at 8.30pm, knackered. You're woken at 3.30am. It's dark and there's no light pollution - the stars! All you hear are the cowls swishing. You wander around in these ghostly corridors. For me, it's a sort of heaven. It's very... it's sort of...I suppose I think these places are my places."
And he "came to understand that it was not simply a particular set of religious rituals that I had to acquire. Monastic life takes everyday rituals of life and formalises them, harnessing the potential for gravitas in the simplest of actions."
But, goodness, what one wouldn't have given to see the look on the faces of those German petrol-station attendants. One must naturally assume that even their simplest actions - a jaw dropping slowly, a frown forming, a lairy grin - demonstrated that same potential for gravitas. Not even Jacques Tati could have come up with a scene like that.