London W11 3AH
United Kingdom
The newly launched Jencks Foundation website is a publishing platform that makes the Jencks Archive accessible online and connects it with contemporary cultural discourse. Designed by John Morgan Studio, and edited by Eszter Steierhoffer, the website launches with two content themes, a broad selection of writing and drawings by Charles Jencks and a series of new commissions in dialogue with the archive. As the cataloguing of the archive advances and the foundation’s public programme evolves, material will be published on an ongoing basis. The catalogue of the Jencks Archive will be available online in 2023.
The Jencks Foundation opened The Cosmic House to the public for the first time in September 2021. Situated in London’s Holland Park, the house is one of the world’s most important examples of post-modern architecture and design, and became the UK’s first Grade I listed post-modern house. Begun in 1978, the design of the house was a collaboration between Charles and Maggie Jencks and the architect Terry Farrell with contributions from Piers Gough, Eduardo Paolozzi, Michael Graves, Allen Jones and others. As the spiritual home of post-modernism, it hosted conversations with the leading architects and thinkers of the day. The Jencks Foundation’s public programme will continue this convivial collaborative project through its website and editorial projects, inspired by Jencks’ characteristic learning and wit.
The first editorial theme of the website, “Architistics: Architecture’s Linguistics” builds on the foundation’s research related to the inaugural exhibition Cosmic, Comic, Cosmetic: Themes and Designs for a House, that marked the public opening of The Cosmic House. It collects material related to the design of the house and Charles Jencks’ interest in the relationship between architecture and semiotics, and how architecture can communicate meaning. The idea of architectural iconography as narrative, and how The Cosmic House “speaks” through its symbolic programme, for all its successes and failures, is explored through this collection of essays and images drawn from the Jencks Archive.
“Isms and Wasms,” the second editorial theme of the website, explores the complex constellations of movements, ideas, affiliations and associations that formed modernism and post-modernism. In books including Modern Movements in Architecture (1973) and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Charles Jencks looked at the edges of these movements: the eccentric, the bizarre and the outsider cultures of architecture beyond the mainstream. Here he found an endlessly splintering taxonomy of “isms” (and “wasms”), the constantly morphing movements in culture and architecture interacting, crossing over, fading away and leaving ripples in their wake. His famous diagrams Six Streams of Architecture and the later Evolutionary Tree illustrate his understanding of the evolution of ideas and styles in architecture as an organic flow of undulating blobs. “Isms and Wasms,” an expanding collection of essays, articles, and diagrams, provides an insight into this rich tapestry, which launches with a series of newly commissioned essays to debate the relevance of post-modernism today. In the coming months, the foundation’s focus will be on revisiting Charles Jencks’ diagrams and releasing new related material.
About the Jencks Foundation
The newly established Jencks Foundation acts as a cultural laboratory to promote critical experimentation in historical and artistic research. Our laboratory programme is organised around an annual theme and developed through an exhibition, new commissions, residencies, salons and seminars, which, in turn, feed the foundation’s future public programme.
The Jencks Foundation will also catalogue and preserve Charles Jencks' archive and extensive library, as the key site of the laboratory programme. The house contains Charles’ archive from his work as a historian, critic, land artist and co-founder of Maggies Cancer Caring Centres. The foundation will open these resources to the public to encourage study of the architecture and culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The Jencks Foundation is directed by Lily Jencks, with Artistic Director Eszter Steierhoffer, and Keeper of Meaning and Chair of the Steering Group, Edwin Heathcote.
