ABSTRACT
Gore Vidal, expert at hitting exposed nerves, calls the USA ‘the United States of Amnesia’. Americans are encouraged to forget their past as quickly as possible, the argument goes, so that a corporation or politician can sell the population something it already has. In order to oil the wheels of production and consumption, the modern world demands a succession of new revolutions that no one notices are really old ones. In architecture, the 1990s saw the fifth version of minimalism produced in the twentieth century, typified by the work of John Pawson for Armani, Jigsaw and Calvin Klein. What did this outburst of tabula rasa signify – spiritual haute couture, boutique Cistercianism, or something else?
