John Pawson's career as an architect and designer spans a variety of sizes and programmes: from bowls to bridges, and monasteries to Calvin Klein stores. In addition to his acclaimed design work, he is the author of Phaidon's successful 'Minimum', a book that paired images and captions to illustrate the notion of simplicity in a beautiful and inspirational manner. 'Visual Inventory' presents some of the images from Pawson's personal collection of over 200,000 digital snapshots. The book opens with an essay explaining the importance of photography as a tool for Pawson's work, and the images are set one per page with illuminating captions. Covering a huge range of subjects, the photographs form a remarkable body of reference material. Some of the images illustrate a particular idea about form, material or space; others reflects the author's interest in returning repeatedly to certain subjects, capturing the changes brought by different weather, light conditions, seasons and patterns of use. Each image has been chosen for the book because it is useful, offering a lesson in visual thinking. None of the photographs in the book have been cropped or altered; it is the selection, arrangement and captioning of the images that make this book unique, valuable and attractive to any architect, designer, artist or student who wants to see the world around them with a stronger eye.

John Pawson，(1949年－，生於英國約克郡），英国建築及空間設計大師，風格極為簡約，以水泥模造的樓梯與巧妙的燈光設計，是波森最經典的設計。

其作品包含了香港國際機場國泰航空貴賓室、卡文·克萊紐約、巴黎、東京等旗艦店、倫敦的JIGSAW旗艦店，另外還有位於西班牙馬德里的Hotel Puerta America，約翰負責了飯店大廳及藝廊的空間規劃。他的名言是「愈簡約，愈能看出是物本身的面相」，年輕時曾遊歷日本，並在日本的建築師事務所工作過，深受東方文化及禪風寫意的影響，堪稱是90年代至今，極簡主義最具代表性的建築師之一。