Charles Jencks

A feature on the post modernist thinker and writer Charles Jencks. Published in the Times Higher Educatiion Supplement in the late 1990s.


The new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is casting long shadows in the twilight of the 20th century. Frank Gehry’s stunning titanium clad structure has already achieved iconic status and been widely hailed as the building of the epoch.

Beyond its beauty is its economic impact on the Basque region. This has given it a persuasive power that may have helped overcome resistance to other equally bold new architectural ventures.

The Post-Modernist theorist and architectural historian Charles Jencks is enraptured by the building too - it features on the covers of both his last and his next book - for its arrival is the first major sign of what he believes is a significant shift in architectural ideas and, perhaps, our world view.

In a recent essay he wrote: “Along with Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and Peter Eisenman’s school of architecture in Cincinnati, it is a building which confirms the new paradigm of what could be called Complexity Architecture or Nonlinear Architecture. It extends ideas which are at the edge of knowledge.”

Jencks thrives at this edge. He was born in New England and educated at Harvard. In 1965 he came to London as a Fulbright scholar and studied architecture, gaining his PhD under Reyner Banham. He has lived here since.

He has spent his career thinking, writing and teaching about architecture and its place in the broader culture.

Increasingly this wider context - perceived through the focus of a detailed understanding of architectural theory and practice - has dominated his work.

As one of the century’s most articulate explainers of architectural Modernism his work led him to become a founder and leading theorist of Post Modernism.

Since 1969 he has produced nearly 30 books on architecture and on Post Modernism including, perhaps, the most lucid manifesto for this still much misunderstood movement - his 1986 book “What Is Post Modernism?” It offers succinct summations: “An intense commitment to pluralism is perhaps the only thing that unites every post-modern movement and also something that marks the tradition as a Western invention, the part of the world where pluralism is most developed.

In architecture it questions: “The hegemony of Modernism; its elitism, reductivism and exclusivism and its anti-city and anti-history stance.
Today I still partly define post modernism as I did in 1978 as double coding - the combination of modern techniques with something else.

“Double coding means elite/popular, accommodating/subversive and new/old.....Post modernism has the essential double meaning: the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence.”

Modernism’s blessings have been mixed. It has created a political landscape crucial to the emergence of a liberalism in which the Post-Modern and pluralist idea of multi-culturalism can take root. Tolerance emerges from this pluralism. So do values.


“Social values are constructed in conflict and if you’re missing this conflict you are going to miss the creativity. That is where Post-Modernism differs because we don’t want to win because we lose if we do! Value emerges from struggle. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that. He wanted the U.S. constitution to guarantee the right of revolution to every generation.”

But equally Jencks is worried by the climate of opinion created by the contemporary dominance of Darwinism and Modernism. He is particularly critical of Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins whom he labels authoritarian sociobiologists. “Pinker and several others suggest that genes are extremely determinative of our thoughts, our actions, behaviour - the culture. He and Dawkins convey to readers and the general public a dog-eat-dog survivalist morality and this climate of opinion shapes people’s interactions and I think it lowers culture terrifically. It is entropic in a cultural sense. It means we treat each other as means, not ends. These ideas don’t create concentration camps or third world exploitation, nor the vast exploitation that you get in economically driven societies, but the ideology helps channel those patterns.”

“People like Stephen Jay Gould are very strong on the implications of Darwinism. If you really understand Darwin you don’t just get weeding out. You get mass decimation. You get the killing of nine in ten. Anything has to be killed off for the one in ten to survive. The implications are extremely repressive of us as human beings.”

Alongside such considerations issues such as decoration in architecture may seem slight. But Jencks see connections. He criticises Robert Venturi’s Sainsbury wing to the National Gallery for instance.

“I thought ‘How crazy’ when Venturi put Egyptian columns on the National Gallery- a renaissance building for renaissance art. The guy is barmy and the British should have said: ‘What the hell are you doing Mr Venturi.’ ” The sin, in Jencks view, was a lack of meaning - the use of meaningless symbols in ornamentation. The roots of Jencks’ understanding of the importance of symbolism and meaning go back to his Harvard days - and exposure to ideas seldom encountered by architects.

At Harvard Jencks studied English literature and arrived at ideas still central to his thinking. From the philosopher George Boas he got the theory of multivalence - of many meanings in a work of art.

“Then through Coleridge and I. A. Richards I got the important idea that what really matters in a work of art is imagination as opposed to fancy. Coleridge says fancy puts things together mechanically and adds one thing to another, whereas the synthetic power of the imagination reconstitutes as it fuses parts into each other. There is a real difference between addition or the conjunction of things and their fusion and that difference is creativity and that struck me as a good measure of multivalence. So my early work was from literary criticism trying to formulate what I called a theory of value and in time two ideas came together. One was this theory of multiple meaning being important and the other was creativity by imaginative fusion as opposed to fancy -- and therefore you could distinguish between good and bad literature, good and bad architecture, good and bad anything.”

Jencks, now nearing 60, continues to be furiously creative. He recently visited Chandigarh in India, the Punjab capital planned and built by Le Corbusier. He is now rewriting his landmark work, "Le Corbusier And the Tragic View of Architecture," presenting him as the "architect of the century". In between he lectures regularly and has another book published this month entitled "Ecstatic Architecture".

However while writing and teaching - he has lectured at more than 40 universities around the world - Jencks has had little chance to work as an architect. Houses in New England, California and London plus a scatter of other smaller projects comprise his portfolio.

But over the past decade he has spent a fair bit of time gardening - on a grand scale. His gardens are about the nature of the universe and its underlying creative principles. They’re in the grounds of his late wife Maggie Keswick's family home in Scotland and are still in progress. The largest is the Garden of Cosmic Speculation - a landscape transformed with spirals, fractal patterns, soliton waves, folds, and other metaphorical representations of such non-linear scientific ideas as complexity theory and chaos.

Jencks has often explored his creative ideas in solid form as well as words. Every detail of the interior of his Georgian house on an elegant West London street, for instance, has been reworked into a dense complex of symbols - representing the multiple meanings of time - cosmic and everyday. It is a stunning creation - sadly visible to the public only in his book: “Towards a Symbolic Architecture”.

In the gardens Jencks is exploring the deeper ideas which increasingly dominate his writing - and of which Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum is an early signpost - the concept of Cosmogenesis.

In 1985 Jencks wrote: “Historically we are placed at a point of scepticism - scientists, cosmologists and theologians cannot even begin to agree on the nature of the universe and many recent architects have celebrated relatively trivial subjects.”

It was about this time that Jencks and his wife Maggie Keswick, an expert on Chinese landscapes, began the gardens. The ideas they embody are a response to this crisis - the lack of a shared global philosophy or uniting “metanarrative.”

His most recent book “The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe” is subtitled: “ A polemic: How complexity science is changing architecture and culture”. It addresses this crisis of meaning.

He writes: “Against this background of dissent and decline is an unnoticed growth. A new world-view has started to spring up. For the first time in the West since the 12th century we are beginning to construct an all-encompassing story that could unite people of the globe, a metanarrative of the universe and its creation. This is emerging from contemporary science and cosmology which are again asking deep questions: Where do we come from? Who are we? How do we fit into an evolving world?”

Jencks argues that the present scientific paradigm. is being challenged by new scientific ideas such as complexity theory, fractal geometry, quantum theory and non-linear mathematics. He argues that the standard science and historical theology which view the Universe as developing gradually and deterministically contrast with the post-modern ‘Sciences of complexity’ which:”taken together paint an entity that is more like a dynamic organism than a dead machine.”

He sums up the Cosmogenic view, as: “The idea that the Universe is a single, unfolding self-organising event, something more like an animal than a machine, something radically interconnected and creative, an entity that jumps suddenly to higher levels of organisation and delights us as it does. Complexity Theory, the Gaia hypothesis, Chaos and Quantum theories all point in this direction. We know truths that have been revealed to no other generation and they can give us great hope and strength”.

He argues that the new understanding of reality overturns “the four great enslaving isms of modernity: determinism, mechanism, reductivism and materialism. The new concepts which have replaced them are emergence, self-organisation, evolution by punctuated equilibria and cosmogenesis - creativity as basic in the universe.”

“They refute the nihilistic view, developed because of Modern determinism and materialism, that our place in the Universe is accidental, tangential, absurd and discontinuous with the rest of nature. Rather they show, in Paul Davies’ words that: ‘We are built into the laws of the universe in some fundamental ways.’ Mind, consciousness and sentient creatures with intelligence are not alien to but central to the Cosmogenic process.”

But Jencks is not without critics. The New Yorker writer Brendan Gill reviewing "The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe" likened him to a Shelley grown middle aged, writing love poems to the Cosmos.

And the Sokal hoax and the subsequent book "Intellectual Impostures" by Allan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, while not naming Jencks, offers a pungent critique of the misuse of new science by French Post-Modernist theorists - accusing them of a fundamental failure to understand scientific concepts.

However Jencks' prescience has proved remarkable and, whether a new paradigm is emerging or not, a new architecture is taking shape. Architects as diverse as Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and the engineer Cecil Balmond share common ground in investigating new mathematical and scientific ideas.

“At the end of the day we are seeking another architecture which more accurately reflects the new world view, the truth that we inhabit a self-organising universe, more surprising and open ended than previously imagined. “

“We have lived through a modernist, Darwinian, nihilist period which denied there was value in the universe - that it was all a pathetic fallacy. We were the great accident because we could speak and think and see our own mortality. Yet it all added up to nothing. I think they were wrong. The Universe has meaning.”