For the British architect John Pawson, minimalism isn’t just a design philosophy, but a life philosophy—with his 1996 book, Minimum, serving as a defining jumping-off point. Over the course of more than four decades, Pawson has quietly amassed a global following by distilling spaces, objects, and things down to their most essential. With projects ranging from his career-defining Calvin Klein Collection flagship store on Madison Avenue in New York City, completed in 1995, to a remote monastery complex in the Czech Republic he’s been building for Cistercian monks of the Trappist order for more than 25 years; from hotels in Los Angeles, Madrid, and Tel Aviv to London’s Design Museum; from private homes in Colorado, Greece, Japan, Sweden, and beyond, to a chair and cookware; from lamps and linens to doorknobs, bowls, to even a steak knife, Pawson’s tightly focused yet seemingly boundless practice places him in a category all his own.

On the episode—our fourth “site-specific” taping of Time Sensitive, recorded at Pawson’s country home in the Cotswolds—he discusses the problems he sees with trying to turn minimalism into a movement; his deep-seated belief in restraint, both in life and in architecture; and his humble, highly refined approach to creating sacred spaces.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

[08:06] Tetsuka House (2005)

[08:06] “John Pawson’s Approach to Making Life Simpler”

[08:06] Shiro Kuramata

[08:06] Katsura Imperial Villa

[08:06] North York Moors

[12:41] “Minimum” (1996)

[12:41] Sen no Rikyū

[17:35] Calvin Klein Collections Store (1995)

[17:35] Ian Schrager

[17:35] Paul Goldberger

[17:35] Cathay Pacific (1998)

[20:59] “Elements of Style” (1959) by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

[20:59] “Plain Space” (2010)

[20:59] Raymond Carver

[23:08] Bruce Chatwin

[23:08] “Wabi”

[23:08] Chatwin Apartment (1982)

[26:26] Deyan Sudjic

[28:12] Ryōan-ji

[31:11] “John Pawson: Making Life Simpler” (2023)

[30:16] Neuendorf House (1989)

[30:16] Tilty Barn (1995)

[37:19] Claudio Silvestrin

[37:51] Philip Johnson

[40:49] Home Farm (2019)

[40:49] “Home Farm Cooking” (2021)

[47:18] Bill Brandt

[55:46] Hester van Royen Apartment (1981)

[56:36] Casa Malaparte

[56:36] Mies van der Rohe

[56:36] Barcelona Pavilion

[59:356] The Design Museum (2016)

[59:356] Farnsworth House

[59:356] “Inside the Brick House, Philip Johnson’s Private Playground”

[1:02:26] Pawson House (1999)

[1:05:53] The Feuerle Collection (2016)

[1:10:33] Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr (2004)

[1:21:54] Pieter Jansz. Saenredam
 

Through her “archaeology of the future” design approach, the Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh has firmly established herself as a humanist who brings a profound awareness of past, present, and presence to all that she does. In the two decades since winning her breakthrough commission—the Estonian National Museum in Tartu—her practice has taken off, with Ghotmeh swiftly becoming one today’s fastest-rising architectural stars. Just a week after we recorded this episode of Time Sensitive, she was named the winner of a competition to design the British Museum’s Western Range and, shortly after that, she was announced as the architect of the new Qatar Pavilion in the historic Giardini of Venice; she is also the designer of the Bahrain Pavilion at the just-opened 2025 Osaka Expo. Across her high-touch, high-craft projects, whether a brick-clad Hermès leather-goods workshop in Normandy, France, completed in 2023; the timber-framed 2023 Serpentine Pavilion in London; or the concrete-walled Stone Garden apartment tower (2020) in Beirut, Ghotmeh celebrates the hand.

On the episode, Ghotmeh reflects on the long-view, across-time qualities of her work and outlines what she believes is architecture’s role in shaping a better world ahead.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Lina Ghotmeh

[5:01] “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things”

[5:01] George Kubler

[5:01] Trevor Paglen

[8:41] “The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time”

[8:41] Tim Ingold

[11:15] “Windows of Light”

[11:15] “Lecture: Lina Ghotmeh”

[12:06] Beatriz Colomina

[12:06] “Are We Human?”

[19:58] Gaston Bachelard

[24:04] Olga de Amaral

[24:04] Cartier Foundation

[24:04] Juhani Pallasmaa

[24:04] “The Eyes of the Skin”

[26:39] Luis Barragán

[31:09] Stone Garden (2020)

[31:09] Hermès Workshops (2023)

[36:36] Peter Zumthor

[36:36] “Atmospheres”

[41:53] Khalil Khouri

[44:51] Jean Nouvel

[44:51] Norman Foster

[44:51] Estonian National Museum (2016)

[46:41] Renzo Piano

[46:41] Richard Rogers

[46:41] Maya Lin

[46:41] Dan Dorell

[46:41] Tsuyoshi Tane

[50:45] “The Poetic, Humanistic Architecture of Lina Ghotmeh”

[51:40] Rimbaud Museum

[54:48] “Light in Water” (2015)

[54:48] The Okura Tokyo

[59:22] Les Grands Verres, Palais de Tokyo (2017)

[59:44] Zero-Carbon Hotel Concept (2019)

[59:42] Serpentine Pavilion (2023)

[1:04:11] Osaka Expo Bahrain Pavilion (2025) 

For as long as he can remember, Leonard Koren has been searching for beauty and pleasure. Throughout his career, the author and artist—he prefers the term “creator”—has spent considerable time putting to paper expressions and conceptual views that architects, artists, designers, and others have long struggled to find the proper framing of or words for. In 1976, when he launched the counterculture publication WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, he ushered in the idea of “gourmet bathing,” which has maintained a potent cultural niche in the nearly 50 years since. With Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, published in 1994, Koren introduced the Japanese expression for “beautiful, imperfect, and impermanent” to the West, where it quickly took on a life of its own. Perhaps one of Koren’s greatest talents is his rare ability to translate philosophical meditations on seemingly esoteric subjects into accessible, approachable texts about ways of being, seeing, thinking, making, and feeling. 

On the episode, Koren details his best—and worst—baths, and explains why he views his life as one long aesthetic experience.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:
Leonard Koren

[4:01] “Undesigning the Bath”

[7:30] Century Tower

[7:30] 7132 Hotel (Therme Vals)

[9:26] “WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing”

[9:26] Max Palevsky

[9:26] Craig Elwood

[13:32] “From ‘WET’ to ‘Wabi-Sabi’: Leonard Koren’s Adventurous Aesthetic Journey”

[13:32] Mick Jagger

[13:32] Richard Gere

[13:32] Debbie Harry

[17:09] Charlie Haas

[18:25] “The Slow Lane”

[18:25] Pilar Viladas

[21:49] “How to Take a Japanese Bath”

[21:49] “Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers”

[21:49] “Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts”

[28:23] Okakura Kakuzō’s “The Book of Tea”

[31:38] Glenn Adamson

[31:38] Sen no Rikyū

[39:29] “Noise Reduction: A 10-Minute Meditation for Quieting the Mind”

[42:32] “The Haggler’s Handbook”

[44:22] “283 Useful Ideas from Japan”

[46:56] “The Flower Shop”

[46:56] Blumenkraft

[46:56] “On Creating Things Aesthetic”

[46:56] “Which “Aesthetics” Do You Mean?”

Since publishing his debut essay collection—Video Night in Kathmandu, featuring far-flung reportage from 10 Asian countries—in 1988, the prolific travel writer Pico Iyer has gone on to write more than a dozen books exploring themes ranging from displacement and identity to globalization and technology, as well as contribute to publications such as The New York Times, Time, and Condé Nast Traveler. Over the years, Iyer’s travels have taken him to some of the world’s most remote destinations—North Korea, Bhutan, and Iceland, to name a few—but it’s his hundred-plus visits to a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, that form the heart of his latest book, Aflame: Learning From Silence. Connecting with his inner stillness during these various sojourns in solitude has left him wholly transformed, opening him up to discover the thrumming, ineffable joy of being truly awake to the world and wonderfully alive. 

On this episode of Time Sensitive, Iyer explores the purpose and joy of travel, and shares deeply moving reflections about what he finds most essential in life.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Pico Iyer

[4:25] “Aflame”

[4:25] “Autumn Light”

[4:25] Philip Larkin

[4:25] “The Art of Poetry No. 30”

[7:18] Bashō

[7:18] Leonard Cohen

[10:21] New Camaldoli Hermitage

[10:21] Post Ranch Inn 

[16:25] “Postmodern Tourism: A Conversation with Pico Iyer”

[17:08] “The Eloquent Sounds of Silence”

[21:48] “The Joy of Quiet”

[31:42] “What Ping-Pong Taught Me About Life”

[33:14] “Walden”

[37:28] “The Open Road”

[41:37] “Video Night in Kathmandu”

[41:37] “The Lady and the Monk”

[41:37] “Lonely Places”

[41:37] The Global Soul

[44:40] “In the Realm of Jet Lag”

[52:35] “Culture: The Leading Hotels of the World”

[55:17] Potala Palace

[55:17] Naoshima, Japan

[55:17] Teshima, Japan

[55:17] Narita, Japan

[01:00:43] “The Half Known Life”

[01:10:10] “No Time”

Faye Toogood is perhaps best known for her Roly-Poly chair, among the more famous pieces of furniture to come out of the 2010s and take over the zeitgeist, but the London-based designer’s artistry and craft runs much deeper and spans much wider. She began finding, collecting, cataloging, producing, and editing her “assemblages” long before she ever had a name for them, and her design career has been marked by exactly that, beginning with the debut of Assemblage 1 (2010) and through to her latest, Assemblage 8: Palette (2024). On the whole, Toogood’s creations serve as material investigations and discipline-defying attempts to better understand herself. Without formal training in design, Toogood—who was the Designer of the Year at the Maison&Objet design fair in Paris this past January and the Stockholm Furniture Fair’s Guest of Honor in February—uses what she describes as the feeling of being “a fraud in the room” to her advantage. Through her work, she is an enigma; with projects across furniture, interiors, fashion, and homewares, she’s unwilling to be defined by a single output and has instead built a multilayered practice and belief system that allows her to be “all heart and hands.” 

On this week’s Time Sensitive—our debut of Season 11—Toogood talks about the acts of creation and connection, and how each underscores the enduring play that’s ever-present in her work.

Special thanks to our Season 11 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Faye Toogood

Toogood

[3:49] Assemblage 1

[7:43] Assemblage 7

[13:28] Seamus Heaney

[14:50] Isamu Noguchi

[14:50] Kan Yasuda

[17:23] Roly-Poly chair

[18:06] Rachel Whiteread

[20:07] Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden

[22:45] Matisse Chapel

[25:40] “Ways of Seeing”

[29:57] “Womanifesto!”

[36:55] Assemblage 8

[52:17] “The World of Interiors”

Malcolm Gladwell may be one of the most widely read—and, with his Revisionist History podcast, listened to—journalists of our time. A New Yorker magazine staff writer and the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008), he has myriad awards and honors to his name. But this impressive trajectory has never been some planned-out or preordained journey; in fact, as Gladwell says on this episode of Time Sensitive, he has never been one to try to overly plan for or divine the future—of his career, of his life, or of anything, really. “Expectations are a burden and wherever possible should be abandoned,” he says. Gladwell’s radical receptiveness is perhaps what has led him to become one of today’s most prolific and eclectic writers, reporting on topics ranging from office design and french fries, to dog fighting and Steve Jobs, to automobile engineers and marijuana. Across all of his writing, Gladwell exhibits a rare sleight-of-hand ability to take certain intellectual or academic subjects and leap-frog them into popular culture, and, in doing so, make seemingly esoteric phenomena entertaining and widely accessible.

On the episode—recorded in the Pushkin Industries outpost in Hudson, New York—Gladwell talks about the disappearance of what he calls “the critical enterprise in America”; and how A.I. is complicating his famous “10,000-Hour Rule.”

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Malcolm Gladwell

[4:36] Revenge of the Tipping Point

[5:06] The Tipping Point

[13:43] Unsafe at Any Speed

[22:52] Anand Giridharadas

[24:00] Revisionist History

[25:39] Blink

[31:07] The Holocaust in American Life

[43:16] “10,000-Hour Rule”

[43:16] Outliers

[56:06] The Bomber Mafia (Podcast Mini Series)

[56:06] Pushkin Industries

[59:56] John Grisham

[1:06:56] The Bomber Mafia  (Book)

Richard Christiansen believes that the true definition of luxury is having one’s senses on full blast—seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing, and touching the world around by engaging in its beauty and bounty to the fullest. This idea is at the heart of his company, the garden-pleasure apothecary Flamingo Estate, which is both a place—a home and garden on a seven-acre property in the hills of Los Angeles—and a brand, which operates a global farming collective and sells wellness, beauty, and “home essentials” products. In just a few years, Flamingo Estate has collaborated with cultural figures such as Julianne Moore, Martha Stewart, and Ai Weiwei, and created some 200 or so products, from C.S.A.-style farm boxes and flower arrangements, to scented candles and a rosé wine, to body washes and chocolates. Capturing the spirit of all this is a new book, Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive, which tells the story of his company’s rapid rise and includes interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda, John Legend, and Alice Waters.

On the episode, Christiansen talks about his lifelong connection with beekeeping and honey; why more brands should embrace “radical inconsistency” in their products; and how reading a book by Jane Goodall, and later befriending the anthropologist and conservationist, changed the course of his life.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Richard Christiansen

[4:24] Flamingo Estate

[8:05] Flamingo Estate: The Guide to Becoming Alive

[46:21] Jane Goodall

[12:48] Alice Waters

[15:06] Harvey

[35:35] Chandelier Creative

[45:51] Benetton

[45:51] Colors

[50:35] Rumiko Murata

[52:35] Owl Bureau

[58:28] “The Summer Day”

To the majority of humankind, rocks may appear to be static, timeless objects, but not to the geologist Marcia Bjornerud. In her mind, rocks are rich pieces of text that have evolved (and continue to evolve) across millennia, and are therefore incredibly timeful. “They almost demand reading,” Bjornerud says on this episode of Time Sensitive. “You have the feeling that you’re communicating with some larger, wilder, more ancient wisdom.” A two-time Senior Fulbright Scholar, a professor of geology at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and an expert on the geophysics of earthquakes and mountain building, Bjornerud serves as a sort of geological translator of these “texts,” reading their encrypted messages and stories—tracing their etymologies, essentially—and from there inferring why things are the way they are. Bjornerud’s translations shine across her four books, including the newly published Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.

On the episode, she discusses the power of looking at the world through a Deep Time lens, why we’re currently in what she considers a “golden age” of geoscience, and what a “time literate” society would mean for humanity and the planet.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Marcia Bjornerud

[15:18] Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

[07:16] Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks

[07:16] “Studying Stones Can Rock Your World”

[07:16] Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities

[07:16] Carbon cycle

[09:47] Rock deformation

[13:54] The overview effect

[17:42] “Geology Is Like Augmented Reality for the Planet”

[21:28] Colonization of Mars

[21:28] Anthropocene

[29:06] Planned obsolescence

[29:06] Green technology revolution

[31:40] Seventh Generation Principle

[34:01] Stonehenge

[38:29] University of Minnesota

[41:02] Svalbard, Norway

[41:02] Norwegian Polar Institute

[44:15] Yoshihide Ohta

[50:06] “Lost Time in Amatrice”

[54:19] Kola Superdeep Borehole

With great privilege, believes the humanitarian and entrepreneur Nachson Mimran, comes great responsibility. Brought up in a family that operates one of the largest agri-industrial businesses in West Africa, Mimran comes from considerable wealth, but unlike so many who have a background such as his, he is open and forthright about his inheritance and the responsibility he sees of doing good with it. With his decarbonization, refugee empowerment, and “human optimization” organization to.org, he’s creating deep impact through various design and development projects in refugee settlements—including the Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Center, completed last year in Uganda—and empowering individuals and communities via what he describes as “venture philanthropy.” At The Alpina Gstaad hotel in the Swiss Alps, which he’s the co-founder of, he provides exceptional hospitality experiences that subvert certain traditional industry codes, fostering a relaxed but elevated environment.

On the episode, recorded in front of a live audience at The Lobby “hospitality event” in Copenhagen earlier this fall, Mimran discusses his big-picture view of the word hospitality; how a family tragedy led him and his brother to found to.org; and his bold vision for building transformative spaces for refugees.

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Nachson Mimran

[00:44] The Lobby

[03:46] to.org

[09:37] The Alpina Gstaad

[09:37] Jean Claude Mimran

[11:00] Marcel Bach

[13:47] Arieh Mimran

[19:29] Pangaia

[23:28] Regenerate

[23:28] Kakuma Refugee Settlement

[23:28] Sumayya Vally

[26:04] Hassell

[26:04] Xavier De Kestelier

[27:06] Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Centre

[27:06] Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement

[27:49] Mike Zuckerman

[27:49] Nakivale Refugee Settlement

[32:11] The Throne

[38:16] Kutupalong Refugee Settlement

[48:09] André Balazs

Perhaps best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009)—or, more recently, Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023)—the author, essayist, and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem could be considered the ultimate modern-day Brooklyn bard, even if today he lives in California, where he’s a professor of English and creative writing at Pomona College. His most celebrated books take place in Brooklyn, or in the case of Chronic City, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and across his genre-spanning works of fiction, his narratives capture a profound sense of the rich chaos and wonder to be found in an urban existence. Lethem is also the author of several essay collections, including the newly published Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture (ZE Books), which compiles much of his art writing from over the years written in response to—and often in exchange for—artworks by friends, including Gregory Crewdson, Nan Goldin, and Raymond Pettibon.

On the episode, Lethem discusses his passion for book dedications; the time he spent with James Brown and Bob Dylan, respectively, when profiling them for Rolling Stone in the mid-aughts; how his work is, in part, a way of dealing with and healing from his mother’s death in 1978, at age 36; and why he views his writing as “fundamentally commemorative.”

Special thanks to our Season 10 presenting sponsor, L’École, School of Jewelry Arts.

Show notes:

Jonathan Lethem

[5:35] Cellophane Bricks

[5:35] High School of Music and Art

[5:35] Motherless Brooklyn

[5:35] The Fortress of Solitude

[5:35] The Disappointment Artist

[7:15] Carmen Fariña

[9:08] The Great Gatsby

[9:08] Brooklyn Crime Novel

[10:59] Lynn Nottage

[13:08] Bennington College

[23:41] The Collapsing Frontier

[23:41] Italo Calvino

[27:37] Dada movement

[27:37] Dissident Gardens

[31:21] Nan Goldin

[34:33] “The Ecstasy of Influence”

[42:32] “Being James Brown: Inside the Private World of the Baddest Man Who Ever Lived”

[42:32] “The Genius and Modern Times of Bob Dylan”

[51:00] Chronic City

[1:06:26] Jorge Luis Borges