The Language of Architecture

Charles Jencks '57 changed the field of architecture. Jencks, who died in October at 80 years old, was an architectural historian who was known as the godfather of the Postmodern movement. He was also a well- known landscape designer whose massive, head-turning installations pepper the hills and valleys of the United Kingdom. And, Jencks used his knowledge and clout for good as co-founder of Maggie's Cancer Care Centres, a system of uplifting and comforting cancer care centers in the United Kingdom.

Throughout his career, Jencks embraced the utility of architecture as a way to both reflect and support the values of the society around it. Jencks once wrote that, to be successful, an architect "must have social tasks and artistic ones that are symbolically related." His career is an embodiment of this call. Jencks believed that architecture should free, not limit, the lives and thoughts of the people it served; he was humbled by the predictable chaos of the universe that dictates the natural world and our place in it; and he saw architecture's power to affect human emotion and behavior, its power to help humans support and empathize with each other. He was given the Distinguished Brooksian award in 2007.

"A Good Bet"

Jencks was born in Baltimore in 1939. His father, Gardner Platt Jencks, was a concert pianist and modernist composer, and his mother, Ruth Pearl Jencks, was a biologist and artist. Jencks's future as an artist and theorist seems pre-ordained: The family owned a house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, that was a beacon to forward-thinking artists of the time. According to the Financial Times, Jencks claimed that the painter Roberto Matta invented abstract expressionism in 1942 by filling one of the home's candelabra with paint and spinning it above a canvas.

At Brooks, Jencks made his name as an intelligent, sensitive student. In a previous Bulletin profile, Jencks remembers his time on campus: "The greatest problem with Brooks was that there were no women," he joked, "but I remember the beauty of the landscape. I remember the autumns turning a spectacular color." [Ed. Note: see spring 2013 Brooks Bulletin, pgs. 56–57.] At Brooks, Jencks threw himself into academics and athletics. He played football, baseball and basketball, and also joined the wrestling team. More importantly, though, a few of his teachers at Brooks "sparked that intellectual thing in me." By the time he was a sixth-former, Jencks had been named a prefect and been elected to the Cum Laude Society. He had learned to love poetry and literature. Later in life, he befriended the writer Umberto Eco, who introduced Jencks to the field of semiotics; this would greatly influence Jencks's design work.

Jencks credited Brooks with inspiring and solidifying his intellectual curiosity. Two pieces of correspondence, both located in Jencks's alumni file, hint at his potential and at how far his career in architecture would take him. First, a letter from Founding Headmaster Frank Ashburn. When Jencks began the college admission process in the spring of 1956, he turned to Mr. Ashburn for a college recommendation. In typical, honest Ashburn fashion, Mr. Ashburn inserted a short note into Jencks's file: "Jencks is a highly intelligent boy," Mr. Ashburn wrote, "sensitive to good things and with a wider than ordinary cultural background. He is coming along nicely." Mr. Ashburn punctuated his thoughts on Jencks some months later when, in the early days of 1957, Mr. Ashburn appended two more sentences to his recommendation: "Coming along steadily. A good bet."

Second, a letter from Jencks to faculty emeritus Fessenden Wilder. Jencks matriculated to Harvard University and studied for a bachelor's degree in English literature, which he received in 1961. In the course of his undergraduate studies, Jencks wrote to Wilder. "After finishing my senior year here," Jencks mused, "I have plans, vague as yet, to go design school either here or at M.I.T." Jencks ended up choosing Harvard for a second time: He received a second bachelor's degree in architecture and a master's degree in architecture by 1965. He moved to London on a Fulbright Scholarship and earned his doctor- ate in architectural history from University College London in 1970.

As Mr. Ashburn predicted, Jencks was a good bet. He became one of the leading architectural theorists of his time, a prolific writer who tracked the rise and fall of the Modern and Postmodern movements in architecture. Jencks wrote more than 30 books and lectured at more than 40 universities in his career. His book "The Language of Post-ModernArchitecture," first published in 1977, published 11 editions and was translated into 10 languages. It became a bedrock text for subsequent architecture students.

Naming a New Era

In "The Language of Post-Modern Architecture," Jencks called out Modernist architects who, he claimed, said too little in their designs. "We must go back to a point where architects took responsibility for their rhetoric, for how their buildings communicated," he wrote. "An architect's primary and final role," he continued, is to express the meanings a culture finds significant, as well as elucidate certain ideas and feelings that haven't previously reached expression. The jobs that too often take up his energy might be better done by engineers and sociologists, but no other profession is specifically responsible for articulating meaning and seeing that the environment is sensual, humorous, surprising and coded as readable text."

Jencks coined the term "Postmodern,"and argued that this new era was a return to "radical eclecticism" and an embrace of pluralism and difference. He wrote that the new movement combined "opposite codes of architecture that could adequately express the contradictory requirements and tastes of a global society." He believed the Postmodern movement would define meaning in the built environment in new ways. Jencks embraced this new Postmodern era and spent 50 years studying, advocating for and attempting to solidify its importance.

Defining and highlighting the Postmodern movement was important to Jencks because it mirrored and helped explain the rapidly changing, expanding world. Other artistic and scientific fields, he noted, found themselves coming to terms with a more fluid society and a greater wealth of information. "Architecture, like opera, is a hybrid art form necessarily mixing fast-changing technologies and slow-changing values," Jencks wrote. "It is the perfect subject to confront the problems of modernity, and thus the nascent movement helped lead worldwide shifts in the other arts and sciences. Every field soon adopted a pluralist approach, and, in a globalised world, defined its particular version of the new philosophy under such rubrics as 'postmodern dance' and 'complexity science.' Not since the modern world view was adopted centuries ago has such a seismic shift occurred, and it continues to fluctuate in fortune along with its parent, modernity."

"Charles Jencks came to prominence as my architectural cohort was graduating from architecture school and entering the profession," reflects Brooks trustee and noted architect W. J. Patrick Curley III '69. "His thinking and commentary was especially memorable to us because he was among the earliest to articulate the idea of (and coin the term for) Postmodernism, which called for a shift away from strict post-war Modernism to a more culturally attuned form of architectural expression. Although today's architecture still has its roots in Modernism, I'd like to think that Jencks's insights and critiques nudged the profession — and the society we serve — towards a more inclusive, expressive and relevant basis for design."

A Living Landscape

Jencks was particularly inspired by the science of complexity, including chaos theory and catastrophe theory. These fields give order to pandemonium: They show that, as the universe moves toward complexity, higher levels of creativity and organization emerge. Jencks applied that theory to his own field, noting in his previous Bulletin profile that he liked "to hold a mirror up to our society, to our culture — to examine how cultures work."He demonstrated his grappling with the larger organization of the universe and its inhabitants in several sweeping, profound landscape design projects located primarily in Scotland, including The Garden of Cosmic Speculation and the Crawick Multiverse. He sculpted hills and valleys to illustrate scientific ideas ranging in topic from the cosmos to subatomic physics.

The most well-known of Jencks's landscape projects is The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, located at the family home of Jencks and his second wife, Maggie Keswick, in Dumfries, Scotland. Keswick was an expert in Chinese gardens, and she asked Jencks for help designing the home's garden. Together, Jencks and Keswick conceived the garden as a microcosm of the entire universe. Quarks, black holes, fractals and more inspire its features: The 30-acre site consists of sculpted mounds, terraces that play with perspective and geometrically striking staircases. The central feature of the garden is The Universe Cascade, a staircase built into a hillside that draws the observer through a his- tory of the universe. The Universe Cascade consists of 25 landings, each of which represents a critical component of the history of the uni- verse. The piece culminates at the bottom of the hill, where the stairs proceed into a pool of dark green water that represents the universe's mysterious beginnings.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a private garden that opens its doors to the public once a year for charity. The goal of pieces like The Universe Cascade and The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Jencks told the Bulletin in his previous profile, is to communicate com- plicated scientific theories to the lay public. "I often work with scientists, but they may not be connected to the cultural-artistic world," he told the magazine. "They may not want to tell the story of the universe in an amusing, arresting way." Jencks's website adds that The Garden of Cosmic Speculation "uses nature to celebrate nature, both intellectually and through the senses, including the sense of humor."

Jencks mused on the fundamental connection humans have with the natural world in a book he wrote about The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. "When you design a garden,"he wrote,"it raises basic questions. What is nature, how do we fit into it, and how should we shape it where we can, both physically and visually?" He argued that "Serious garden art" — Japanese Zen gardens, Persian paradise gardens, traditional English and French gardens — are, on some level, "analogies of the cosmos as then understood."

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation welcomed a neighbor, Jencks's Crawick Multiverse, in 2015. Crawick Multiverse, located at the site of a sprawling old coal mine, is another piece of landscape art that seeks to illustrate broad theories about the universe. The 55-acre installation depicts the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. The piece portrays theoretical physics and theories on the origins of the universe through Jencks's trademark geometric shapes, pools, paths and concentric circles. Jencks described the Crawick Multiverse in the reunion notes section of the summer 2017 Bulletin. "The theme is 'Cosmic Collisions,' and I am hard at work on installations of Colliding Galaxies — the greatest birthing events in the universe," he wrote. He encouraged Brooksians to visit the site, concluding "A good time is guaranteed as long as it doesn't rain, which is not much of a guarantee in the western part of Britain ... but it's also great fun in a Scottish mist."

Architecture of Hope

Jencks's second wife, Maggie Keswick, inspired his landscape architecture. She also inspired a pursuit of his that serves a concrete, greater good. When Keswick was diagnosed with cancer in 1993, the couple began rounds of treatment, consultation and research. As they spent significant amounts of time in hospitals, the couple noticed the grim, neutral, uncomfortable surroundings they often found themselves in and resolved to do better.

The couple set off on a mission to build a series of non-clinical support centers for cancer patients that radiated warmth and comfort, and that escaped the institutional atmosphere of hospitals and clinics. The idea was simple: to create facilities where patients could be surrounded with beauty, community and calm as they fought the disease.

Keswick died in 1995, but the idea for the care centers — called Maggie's Centres — lived on. The first center was built in Edinburgh; today, almost two dozen centers are located across the United Kingdom and abroad, with 10 more in development. Jencks used his influence in his field and arranged for each of the centers to be designed by a well-known architect. Centers have been designed by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Murphy and other boldface names. Many of the centers have won design awards, and the project was dubbed the "architecture of hope" in a book authored by Jencks. In 2016, the centers received almost 220,000 visits from people with cancer and their family and friends. Speaking to the BBC in 2015, Jencks praised Britain's National Health Service's ability to provide medical care, but highlighted "all the other things — like where you get a loan, how you face your boss if you have cancer, where you buy a wig, how you look good and feel better. Our role is all the secondary things."

The centers are small in size, but they host a large mission: they offer a space that is welcoming, life-affirming and beautiful, as well as committed to the importance of art. They provide free practical, emotional and social support to cancer patients and their loved ones. They are dedicated to helping people with cancer help themselves, to helping care providers do more and to the power of architecture itself. "As people walk into a centre after a diagnosis or enervating treatment, often disoriented and lacking in self-confidence," Jencks wrote, "they enter another world which acknowledges their importance and a basic condition that may become prevalent: living with cancer and not losing hope."