John Pawson was born in Halifax, Yorkshire (England), on 1949. After working for some time in his family's textile company, he lived in Japan for several years; in the last years of his stay in the Japanese state he moved to Tokyo, where he visited the studio of the Japanese architect and designer Shiro Kuramata. Back in England, he joined the Architectural Association in London, which he left in 1981 to open his own studio.