Over the next week or so I will post pictures from San Marco Monastery in Florence. I go there as often as I can when we are in the city, and as early in the morning as I can. Often I am the only person there, caught up in a mood of serene elation as I walk along its spare, polished, perfectly proportioned corridors. Is there a link between the asceticism of San Marco and the exacting simplicity of a current designer like John Pawson? Clearly. Both Le Corbusier, in his time, and more recently Pawson himself point to the ruggedly plain medieval monastery of Le Thoronet in the south of France as a central inspiration for their own work. Modern ascètes from Borges to Loewy to Boulez to Zumthor can't help but come to mind in almost any European monastery,
or strains of Messaien, drifting through the birdsong in the cloister.
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