Charles Jencks
Charles Jencks
Charles Alexander Jencksis an American architecture theorist and critic, landscape architect and designer. His books on the history and criticism of modernism and postmodernism are widely read in architectural circles. He studied under the influential architectural historians Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham. Jencks now lives in Scotland where he designs landscape sculpture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArchitect
Date of Birth21 June 1939
CountryUnited States of America
space perspective elements
Post-Modern space is historically specific, rooted in conventions, unlimited or ambiguous in zoning and irrational or transformational in its relation of parts to whole……. …skew or distorted spaces, created by sharp angles which exaggerate perspective…. …always keep a mental coordinate system no matter how free- form and baroque they become. The reference plane is always an implied frontality, and the route through the building or the curvilinear elements then relate to this conceptual cage
architecture coup died final given infamous july several
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.
horse talking looks
You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.
understanding ornaments kitsch
In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.
beautiful philosophy medicine
The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.
garden celebration ifs
What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?
beautiful people news
Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.
affluence models seems
The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.
house one-liner symbols
A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.
dating details looks
If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.
attitude thinking ideas
Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.
running numbers sunflower
Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.
cells cities mad
The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.
real cancer men
I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.