Minimum Cool

For John Pawson there is richness in the void, splendor in what, to chintz maniacs and the thing-addicted, may seem like . . . nothing.

The 46-year-old British designer (he cannot represent himself as an architect because he never bothered to get a degree) has become well known among the world's ever shrinking band of modernists for clean, wideopen rooms where filigree and objets are banished.

"Space is the modern equivalent of luxury," says the soft-spoken neo-Miesian, reciting a manifesto he began to develop as a schoolboy. At Eton he was reprimanded for removing all of the furniture from his room and slinging up a hammock for a bed. (The housemaster said he was being "pettily different.")

Until recently, Pawson's fans and patrons have been limited to hard-core Less Is More believers (including Charles Saatchi and his ex-wife, Doris). But now masses from various aesthetic persuasions will become familiar with his rigorous emptiness when the large, Pawson-designed Calvin Klein store opens on Madison Avenue in New York this month. Housed on four levels of a 1927 neoclassical building once occupied by J. P. Morgan, the ethereal pantheon to Calvin has been paved in sandstone and fitted with display racks fashioned from sandblasted steel. Other than the clothes (which, of course, tend toward the beige), there is little else. "When you look at the facade you just see a temple with single panes of glass rising 34 feet between the pillars," says Pawson. "It's meant to be the world of Calvin Klein." Though, he adds, "Calvin jokes that if it were up to him and me we wouldn't have any clothes in it."

MATTHEW TYRNAUER