Jigsaw peace - interior design of Jigsaw store in Bond Street, London

Architectural Review, The, July, 1996 by Penny McGuire

In spite of its enduring reputation as an elegant shopping street, Bond Street - running between Oxford Street on the north and Piccadilly on the south - seemed even at the end of the '80s a genteel backwater, redolent of art galleries and places selling cashmere twinsets, scarves printed with horses' heads, and other such emblems of the British landed gentry. But because the street is an inseparable part of London's central shopping network and therefore the tourist industry that attaches to it, this was bound to change. The arrival during the past few years of international fashion houses, like Versace and Christian Lacroix, has injected some expensive foreign glitz; but the ghost of English gentility still hovering around is sufficient to make them seem temporary interlopers.

In contrast, the new Jigsaw shop by John Pawson brings timeless elegance to the street. It follows the practice's work for Calvin Klein, and its plan, efficient in all respects, shares the clarity created in the latter's establishments. Jigsaw was inserted into rambling premises formerly occupied by a photographic supplier. With the upper part reserved for offices, the ground and basement were stripped out completely and remodelled. A new facade, replacing an old tunnel-like entrance and built of Portland stone and bronze framed glass, was brought up to the line of the pavement, and part of the first floor was cut away to create a six-metre high space, stretching back to a secondary facade on the line of the old one. The double-height gallery - a sharply modelled space of shadows and shifting light - is both a shop window and a luminous introduction to the interior. After the busyness and noise of the street this is a haven of calm and quiet luxury, a flowing opalescent space anchored in places by monolithic pieces of furniture and divided down its length by translucent screens.

Within the irregular plan, a clear rectangle of space for display and sales on each level was established, and the ancillary spaces used for stairs, storage and changing rooms. On the ground level, the rectangle is marked down its length on one side by three simple wooden tables, designed by the practice; on the other, by a low shelving unit. This has a dual function, being set along the line of stairs to the lower level. In between, the acrylic hand-etched screens define four bays where clothes are displayed on adjustable stainless-steel rails. Walls are of polished white plaster and the floor is of bush-hammered granite. A similar strategy was used for the lower level, except that daylight has been simulated at each end by an illuminated acrylic screen and the floor is wooden. The practice's signature is plain in details, like suppression of visible joints between enclosing planes of walls and ceilings, so that outlined by light they seem to float.

As an architect Pawson has always presented something of a conundrum.(1) The extreme purity of his architecture at first glance suggests ascetic sensibilities; he tends to be lumped together under the Minimalist label with other architects of stripped down buildings, and the idiosyncrasies of his work thereby smoothed over. Yet an observant eye must notice how sumptuous, almost archaic at times, is the simplicity. His attachment to pure geometric forms would not by itself be so remarkable, but his use of light and natural materials like stone and wood makes it so and suggests an appreciation of drama. His work expresses delight in the nature of materials and fundamental oppositions - between dense mass and the ethereal, the opaque and the transparent, and so on. His insistence on expressing the essence of things - whether form or material - in designing buildings has a mystical quality, of the kind present in the works of the late Shiro Kuramata (who was a friend and who encouraged him to take up architecture at a relatively late age), of early Mies or Luis Barragan.(2)

So in Jigsaw, solid stone blocks form the treads of the stairs but unadorned and illuminated down their length, the flights seem weightless. Pawson seems to have to know that each tread is solid stone all the way through. Similarly, the materials used for floors on both levels of the shop are monumentally dimensioned. The ground floor is composed of 1.2 m square slabs of granite, and the lower level of handsome fir planks, over nine metres long and about half a metre wide (the near-invisible joints probably cause him anguish for he would have no doubt preferred them to measure the length unbroken), so that their essential nature is emphasised and the length and breadth of the space underscored. His lack of compromise is sustained, at times eccentric, and puts him further than most architects into the artist's sphere. P.M.

1 It may be finally solved when Pawson's book Minimum - 272 pages long, illustrating 5000 years of art and architecture and explaining his philosophy - is published in September 1996 by Phaidon Press.

2 I am indebted to Deyan Sudjic's introduction to John Pawson published by Editorial Gustavo Gili.