the poetic comes from condensation

I am always perplexed
when people look at my house and say that they think it is very beautiful but how can I live like that.
To me the thinking is all the wrong way round. The whole point is that this is how we live, so this is what our house needs to be like.
The architecture is the physical expression of a way of being:
the form does not follow a particular fashion, it follows a particular life.
The life may sort of architecture follows is not one which feels right for everybody.
I am passionate about my work, but I am not out to make converts. The only universal measure is whether space feels comfortable ad right to the people who use it.
Minimalism-- or, as Donald Judd preferred to put it, the simple expression of complex thought--
is but one valid response of an aesthetically diverse society,
answering the needs of particular individuals
and provoking debate in society at large about how we choose to live and how we expect architecture to support these choices.

-- John Pawson. "The Simple Expression of Complex Thought". El Corquis 127, p.7.

When we pursue "poetic spaces", do we ever know what a poem is?

A poem is called a poem, not due to its length, but as a result of condensation of words from complex ideas. And poems can never be explained fully with any verbal expression except for the original wordings, as if poetic spaces can never be fully described by interpretive drawings, models and photos except for the original spaces.

Poems are unspeakable. They can only be decoded by heart, not any other means.

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if the untold love is poetic
let us not tell
sap 20.04.2007

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I think we have to get away from the idea of minimalism as a style and
instead understand it as a way of thinking about space--
its proportions, surfaces and the fall of light.
The vision is comprehensive and seamless,
a quality of space rather than forms, places not things. This is why,
in its fullest and most satisfying expression,
it is not something which you can readily acquire a piece of. ...

I think it is important, too, to understand that
minimalism is no a manifesto for living spartanly.
This is a recurrent misunderstanding which springs in part from its association with movements
where renunciation of one sort or another is a central theme--
it is unusual for a discussion of architectural simplicity not to include some reference to Zen buddhism, the Cistercian Order or the Shakers.
One may respond to the aesthetic expressions
and indeed share many of the needs which these movements have sought to address
without adopting particular codes of behaviour:
one can want a place where it ispossible to be still,
without necessarily wanting to pray in it.

Minimalism is not an architecture of self-denial, deprivation or absence:
it is defined not by what is not there,
but by the rightness of what is
and the richness with which this is experienced....

...
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