Charles Jencks
Champion of Post-modernism in architecture who was co-founder of Maggie’s cancer care centres
CHARLES JENCKS, the architectural historian and critic who has died aged 80, defined Postmodernism in architecture and promoted it in its early years before turning his back on the movement and condemning it for selling out to commercialism; in his later years he became better known as the cocreator, with his second wife Maggie Keswick, of one of the most extraordinary gardens in Britain – and, after her death, as the founder of a new concept in cancer care.
Born in America but based in London for most of his career, Jencks specialised in identifying trends and putting labels on architectural styles. Architects did not always appreciate his pigeon-holing, but his courtly charm and intellect made him impossible to ignore.
Jencks believed that architecture should reflect society’s understanding of the world at a particular time. In his most important book, The Language of Post-modern Architecture (1977), he expressed his belief that the authoritarian modernism that had dominated since the Second World War was burnt out. He identified a new, richer, pluralistic architecture, founded technically on Modernist principles but finding inspiration in the diversity of architectural history.
Thus extended from literature to buildings, Post-modernism flourished, with its pediments, curlicues and other whimsical flourishes, reaching its apogee in the 1980s, when supermarkets began resembling Egyptian temples or palaces in stockbroker’s Tudor, by which time it had already been abandoned by its prophet, who decided that the movement had become little more than “a cheap and tacky way of making commercial building more acceptable.”
For the next decade and a half, Jencks inhabited a sort of architectural no man’s land, having rejected Modernism and Post-modernism, with no obvious place to go.
Then in 1995, he erupted on to the scene again with The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, a visionary work in which he argued that as the old Newtonian models of straight lines, right angles and measurable forces had been replaced by complexity, chaos theory, fractal design and non-linear dynamics, so architecture should try to learn from and describe the way we now understand the universe to work.
Jencks was not only a theoretician. He also believed in putting his ideas into practice. He was married to Maggie Keswick, of the Jardine Matheson Keswick family. An authority on gardening, she had written a work entitled The Chinese Garden. Together they decided to marry their two perspectives to create a garden at their home, Portrack House, in Dumfriesshire in the Scottish lowlands.
The result, completed in the mid-1990s, invented a new grammar for garden design based on the language of science and cosmology, and was as spectacular as it was radical. It incorporated such motifs as enormous double helix structures, soliton waves, broken symmetries, “black holes” and concentric patterns representing the solar system. The garden has been described as one of the most important of the 20th century.
It was while they were creating their Garden of Cosmic Speculation, as it was called, that Jencks and Maggie Keswick became involved in an altogether more ambitious project.
Maggie Keswick had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988 and died in 1995 aged 53. Appalled at the lack of facilities for cancer sufferers in NHS hospitals, before her death she became determined to do something to help other cancer patients come to terms with their diagnosis and developed a concept of sympathetically designed centres where patients could find comfort, relaxation therapy and information about their condition.
After her death, Jencks carried forward her plans by founding a series of “Maggie Centres”, calling on his many friends in the architectural world to help him realise her dream. The first, designed by Richard Murphy, opened in Edinburgh in 1997. The second, in Dundee, was designed free of charge by Frank Gehry and won the 2004 Building of the Year Award. More than 20 further centres have been designed by, among others, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Lord Rogers.
Charles Alexander Jencks was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 21 1939 and educated at Harvard, obtaining his undergraduate degree in English Literature and his Master’s in
Architecture, in 1965. That year he came to London University on a Fulbright scholarship, taking a doctorate in Architectural History in 1970.
In 1968 he had joined the Architectural Association, where he became a lecturer in Architecture. It was here that he met Maggie Keswick, who was studying at the Association. They married in 1978.
Over the next 30-odd years, splitting his time between Britain and America, where he held a visiting professorship at UCLA, Jencks established himself as a prolific writer of some 30 books and a thinker of original vision and provocative theories.
He was never far from the architectural headlines. “Stand still long enough,” wrote one admirer, “and Charles Jencks, American academic and architectural taxonomist extraordinaire, will have you classified, stuffed and mounted in his gallery of movements, trends and -isms. Every new section and subsection of Post-modernism, Post-structuralism or decon [Deconstructivism] is dissected even as it emerges from its chrysalis.”
Having declared in 1977: “Happily we can date the death of Modern Architecture … It expired finally and completely in 1972,” he became the pre-eminent interpreter of Postmodern architecture. The Language of Post-modern Architecture went through six editions and was translated into 10 languages.
In his 2000 book, Le Corbusier: The Continual Revolution in Architecture, a highly readable warts-and-all biography of the father of Modernism, Jencks discovered a renewed admiration for the man often vilified as the guru of the tower block and 1960s town planning. Le Corbusier, Jencks argued, was a man ahead of his time, and his fascination with symbolism, pattern and nature shown in later works such as the Ronchamp Chapel, suggest as close a relationship to architects such as Gehry and Libeskind as to earlier modernists.
Jencks continued writing into his eighth decade: in The Iconic Building (2005), he explored trendiness in architecture, a phenomenon fuelled by the rise of the “starchitect”. In 2007 he published Critical Modernism: where is postmodernism going?, and in 2011 The Story of Post-modernism: five decades of ironic, iconic and critical architecture.
Jencks lectured all over the world, appeared in numerous television films and documentaries and wrote two films for the BBC (Le Corbusier in 1974, and Kings of Infinite Space, on Frank Lloyd Wright and Michael Graves, in 1983). He also designed furniture, some of which features in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert and other museums, and a number of houses.
With his wife Maggie he transformed a Victorian London terraced house into a temple of Post-modernism and redesigned all the Keswick family gardens. An exhibition of Jencks’s work was held in the Redfern Gallery in 1995.
In 1999, on the strength of his achievement at Portrack House, Jencks was invited by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to create a landscape design for its front lawn.
The result, Landform Ueda, a serpentine, stepped mound, with three crescent-shaped pools covering three acres, was inspired by chaos theory and weather systems and won the Museum a £100,000 Gulbenkian prize for Museum of the Year in 2004.
Other commissions included DNA sculptures for James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, Long Island, the Centre for Life at Newcastle upon Tyne and the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.
Jencks was awarded the Japanese Nara Gold Medal for Architecture in 1992 and was Country Life Gardener of the Year in 1998.
Charles Jencks married, first, Pamela Balding in 1960; that marriage was dissolved in 1973. He married, secondly, in 1978, Maggie Keswick, who died in 1995. He married thirdly, in 2006, Louisa Lane Fox, who survives him along with two sons of his first marriage and a daughter and son of his second.
Charles Jencks, born June 21 1939, died October 13 2019