Charles Jencks

The Language of Post-modern Architecture

An illustrated survey of post-modern architecture that points out its successes and more often, its ludicrous failures

The case for improvisation

Adhocism

What is Post-Modernism (What Isà?)

Nathan Silver

Originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972.

The Case for Improvisation

This text discusses the basic ideas of complexity and chaos theories and presents many examples of architecture based on these ideas in the work of leading architects - Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Charles Correa and Itsuko Hasegawa - along with ecological and organic designs. Charles Jenck's own recent work is used to illustrate concepts in physics and an architecture based on waves and twists. This work both advocates and criticizes as it seeks to define a new direction for the contemporary arts.

The Architecture of the Jumping Universe

Modern Movements in Architecture

William Chaitkin

Current Architecture

Charles Jencks has the uncanny capacity to announce a new movement in architecture before it has begun. With Post-Modernism, he was looking to the past. Now, for the first time, with his new book on morphogenesis he is taking a look at the future. There is no question that his argument will have an important critical effect on architecture at the beginning of the new millennium. Peter Eisenman. Architect A new paradigm is sweeping through science, changing both our view of the universe and of mankind. Charles Jencks is one of a handful of thinkers with the courage to embrace the emerging paradigm and interpret it architecturally. This inspired synthesis of art, design, science and philosophy charts a bold new course not only for architecture, but for Post-Modern thought. Paul Davies, Professor of Natural Philosophy, University of Adelaide, author of The Cosmic Blueprint, Superforce, The Mind of God and other books on contemporary science. Who else could have written a book that opens up such cosmic perspectives and still make such neat, sharply focused comments on particular architects and particular styles of architecture? Who else could range with such zest, ease and elegance from Chaos to Bruce Goff, from Coleridge to Frank Gehry, from Complexity Theory to Green Buildings? The old question of in which style should we build can never be addressed in the same way again. Charles Jencks has brought purpose back into architecture. His teleology may transcend what architects are used to, but Jencks manages to make far more sense out of our contemporary architectural dilemmas than practically all the other books in the RIBA book shop. Francis Duffy, Chairman of DEGW International Ltd

A Polemic: How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture

Consideration of the concept as it relates to the arts and literature.

What is Post-Modernism?

"What is Post-Modernism?" Is it a new world view, or an outgrowth of the Post-Industrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture? In this fourth, entirely revised edition, Charles Jencks, one of the founders of the Post-Modern Movement, shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, using diagrams designed especially for this edition, he reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. But why has post-modern culture arrived? In an ironic parable, "the Protestant Crusade." Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden origins: the Modernists' abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudo-religion led in the 1920s to the famous "vacuum-cleaning" period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the "Protestant Inquisition" which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared - Post-Modernism; a Counter-Reformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism. However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of Post-Modernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of Late-Modernism. This takes the de-creation and nihilism of its parent to extremes. The main engine that drives global culture today - post-modernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network - is analysed in its close relation to other "posts": Post-Fordism, Post-Socialism and the post-national world of trading blocs and unstable nations. Jencks argues that this may result in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations. The most radical idea of this challenging book is the conclusion: the notion that the post-modern world does not mean the end of metanarratives, but something quite different. Belief systems are flourishing as never before and, Jencks argues, "a new metanarrative, based on the story of the universe and its generative qualities, will soon create a new world view that will affect all areas. It is a story which grows directly out of the post-modern sciences of complexity and is thus both true and mythic." Other What is...' titles include What is Abstraction?, What is Deconstruction?

What is Post-modernism?

Post-modern Triumphs in London

In The Story of Post-Modernism, Charles Jencks, the authority on Post-Modern architecture and culture, provides the defining account of Post-Modern architecture from its earliest roots in the early 60s to the present day. By breaking the narrative into seven distinct chapters, which are both chronological and overlapping, Jencks charts the ebb and flow of the movement, the peaks and troughs of different ideas and themes. The book is highly visual. As well as providing a chronological account of the movement, each chapter also has a special feature on the major works of a given period. The first up-to-date narrative of Post-Modern Architecture - other major books on the subject were written 20 years ago. An accessible narrative that will appeal to students who are new to the subject, as well as those who can remember its heyday in the 70s and 80s.

Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture

The Story of Post-Modernism

A classic account which, when written in 1977, was the first to define post-modernism in architecture, an event which led to subsequent adoption of the term in many other fields. It is the story of the failure of modern architecture to communicate with its users and the attempt of post-modernists to overcome this failure with a richer, more widely shared language--post-modern classicism. This edition (5th in 1987) brings the account, and the great illustrations, up to date. 101/4x121/2". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This anthology presents the synthesizing trend of Post-Modernism in all its diversity.

The Post-Modern Reader

The Prince, the Architects and New Wave Monarchy

Bruce Weber

Tom Dixon

Barbara Kruger

Leigh Bowery

Jenny Holzer

Ron Arad

Andrea Branzi

Gilbert & George.

Daniel Weil

Boris Sipek

Tommaso Grattoni

King Kong

Shiro Kuramata

Massimo Iosa Ghini

Denis Santachiara

Fashion And The Underground In The 80S

Excess

Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HOPE focuses on an exciting building project that has been underway since the mid-1990s - new cancer caring centres that offer a fresh approach to both architecture and health. Named after Maggie Keswick and co-founded with her husband, the writer and landscape designer Charles Jencks, these centres aim to be situated at all the major British hospitals that treat cancer. Already sixteen have been completed, with at least seven more the pipeline. Starting in Scotland, where the first were built, they have implications well beyond their modest size and origins. Complementary to NHS hospitals, they present a face that is welcoming, risk-taking, aesthetic and life-affirming; and with their commitment to the other arts, including landscape, they bring in the full panoply of constructive means. Maggie's Centres are a new mixed building type for healing that have different roots in the past. As Jencks and Heathcote show, this hybrid quality is a response to the condition of cancer; its myriad causes and bewildering number of possible therapies. The 'architecture of hope' is this new emergent hybrid genre, consisting of various metaphors that correspond in kind to the many different types of cancer and their various treatments. The Centres have been designed by celebrity architects, including Richard Murphy, Page and Park, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Richard MacCormac, the late Kisho Kurokawa, Piers Gough, Wilkinson Eyre and Rem Koolhaas. Additional Centres are being planned by Norman Foster & Partners, Thomas Heatherwick and Steven Holl. The Centres are committed first to helping cancer sufferers help themselves, to inspiring carers to care more, and secondly to architecture. It is the arts and building, important allies in the perennial struggle with cancer, that lead to the 'architecture of hope'. As people walk into a centre after a diagnosis, or enervating treatment, often disoriented and lacking in self-confidence, they enter another world which acknowledges their importance and a basic condition that may become prevalent: living with cancer and not losing hope. This is a new edition of The Architecture of Hope, first published in 2010, but now completely updated and redesigned with new material throughout, and additional essays about the role of art at Maggie's and about the gardens and landscaping. There is also a new section showcasing the way architecture students have responded to the Maggie's brief.

Charles Jencks

About

Books

Join the club