Influences: Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks (1939–2019)

An earlier blog entry of mine, “Genealogy of Influence,” promised a series of posts about the architects and theorists who influenced my architectural world view. This is the latest post in the series.

  

Charles Jencks died last Sunday, October 13, succumbing to cancer at the age of 80. He greatly influenced how I came to appreciate architecture during my student years, helping me understand how buildings and landscapes possessed of order, coherence, and purpose are those most likely to convey meaning. It is lately that his work and the work of his second wife Maggie Keswick (who predeceased him in 1995) have also impressed me with their regard for the potential of architecture as vessels of hope, employing nature and the cosmos as metaphors in the service of a better future.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, by Charles Jencks and Maggie Keswick

Charles Jencks was the embodiment of a polymath. Though I’m most familiar with him as a writer about architecture, he was also a renowned landscape architect responsible for the design of several ambitious projects that employed monumentally geometric forms to express profound ideas about cosmology, chaos theory, and subatomic physics. Jencks was American but I always thought of him as British because he moved to the UK in the mid-1960s, where he received his PhD in Architectural History from University College in London. He would go on to teach at the Architectural Association in London and at UCLA while I pursued my post-professional Master of Architecture degree there during the mid-eighties.

I found his books about architecture engrossing. My personal library includes three of his volumes: Le Corbuiser and the Tragic View of Architecture (1973), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), and Late-Modern Architecture (1980). To say many of his books were influential is an understatement. He’s largely responsible for popularizing the assignment of “isms” to various strands of architecture, of which post-modernism may be most well-known. His sharp wit and provocative writing style made for eminently easy reading.

Jencks’ fluid, taxonomical classification of architectural styles, movements, and architects of the 20^th Century

Jencks specialized in metanarratives—overarching accounts and interpretations of the circumstances that gave structure to various movements in architecture. He classified, categorized, and sorted the work of important architects, conceiving fantastical taxonomical trees to make sense of a confusing proliferation of successive and contemporary notions about meaning (or the ironic absence thereof) in architecture.

Although his writings are central to his legacy, I suspect if we could ask him today he would point to Maggie’s Centres—the series of 21 cancer clinics located throughout the UK and Hong Kong that provide emotional and social support to people with cancer and their family and friends—as his most meaningful work. Named after Jenck’s late wife, each Maggie’s Centre is designed by a leading architect. To date, the list of prominent designers includes Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Kisho Kurokawa, Steven Holl, and Snohetta among others.  

  

Maggie’s Centre, Dundee, designed by Frank Gehry (photo by Ydam [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)])

Researchers say people who have a strong sense of meaning in life tend to live longer than others whose sense of meaning is not as strong. At the least, a sense of meaning is comforting, which it undoubtedly is for the patients who are afforded the comfort provided by Maggie’s Centres. 

As an architect, I want my work to be meaningful. Unfortunately, regardless of whatever longevity I may enjoy, the fact is my time here is finite and in the grand scheme of things quite fleeting. That so many of the individuals who opened my eyes to the power of architecture during my formative years have recently passed is sobering.(1)  It seems like only yesterday that I came to know and learn so much from them, underscoring how brief the opportunity is that we have to make an imprint upon others and the world.

Edwin Heathcoate wrote in the Financial Times that Jencks believed in “the capacity of architecture to not only be given meaning but also to give meaning back to life.” Charles Jencks inspired me to regard architecture through this lens, to have faith in its power to help us express what is most significant and profound. “Can’t you see, we are in dialogue with the universe?” Jencks once said. Fundamentally, his career's focus on semiology in architecture was rooted in his desire to raise our cosmological consciousness.

(1) Among them, Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Bing Thom, Arthur Erickson, and Bill Kleinsasser.