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Chronograms of Architecture
Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lily Jencks, Eszter Steierhoffer
Contributors MOULD, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Marson Korbi, Bryony Roberts, Abriannah Aiken, Urtzi Grau, Francesca Hughes, Mario Carpo, Charles L. Davis II, Curry Hackett, and more…

Charles Jencks’s diagrams sit somewhere between a map and a drawing, rendering and projecting at once. First created in 1969, the timeline stretched from 1920 to 2000, his diagrams were not only analytical, but also speculative. These were drawings of time that looked back to the past in order to predict the future. It is therefore important to recognize and read Jencks’s diagrams as moral exercises and projective acts: a diagnosis of the current state of things, as well as a provocation and call to action to change them.

Chronograms of Architecture is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House within the context of their research program “‘isms and ‘wasms.”

Chronograms of Architecture was exhibited at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London from October 20 to December 9, 2023, and at CIVA in Brussels from May 14 to September 28, 2025.

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10 essays
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Liberation Gardens
Wolff Architects
The chronogram develops through the figure of the garden. Not as an ornament, but a site of survival, relation, fugitivity, and cultural production.
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Chronogram of Chronograms: On Disciplinarity
Maria Fedorchenko and Yeliz Abdurahman
Chronogram of Chronograms is an open-ended, divergent representation of the discipline in transition. It is driven by two interrelated targets: to track and visualize the evolution of core tensions and mediations; and to engage with the project of the chronogram itself, questioning its purposes, methods, and techniques.
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Circular Design Principles: Between Theory and Practice
Lionel Devlieger, Michaël Ghyoot, Adam Przywara, Karen Steukers, Arne Vande Capelle, and Louise Vanhee
It is no secret that the global building sector is enormously resource-intensive, consuming vast amounts of virgin materials and generating colossal quantities of waste.
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Visualizing the Racial Epistemologies of the Architectural Canon
Charles L. Davis II and Curry Hackett
The following diagrams redeploy the visual language of evolutionary histories of architecture to reveal the racial epistemologies that animated these discourses in the past.
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A short but believable history of the digital turn in architecture
Mario Carpo
If we look at buildings as architects, what matters is not so much what digital technologies can do, but what we could not do without them. This is the critical component of innovation, and only an enquiry into this creative leap may help us understand why and how digital tools have changed the way architecture is conceived and built, and the way it looks.
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Cul-de-sac
Urtzi Grau and Francesca Hughes
Given that architecture’s future is written in its schools, we contend that of the many predictive diagrams that Charles Jencks produced, it was his 1969 dissimilarity matrix of the most future-shaping architects of the day that possessed the keenest foresight.
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Feminist Spatial Practices, Part 1
Bryony Roberts and Abriannah Aiken
A vast landscape of feminist spatial practices around the world, stretching back in time and forwards into the future, resists power and imagines new futures through experimental storytelling, community-building, educating, material testing, and fabricating new architectures.
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Base and Superstructure: A Vulgar Survey of Western Architecture
Pier Vittorio Aureli and Marson Korbi
It is well known that within Marxism the term “base” addresses the way in which human beings produce and reproduce themselves, while “superstructure” ...
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Architecture is Climate
MOULD
Without the pretence of a stable discipline producing fixed objects, architecture becomes part of a febrile and disrupted world, vulnerable to its contingencies. No longer standing outside and applying superficial patches to the wounds of climate, architecture is climate binds the discipline and its humans to the scars, violence, and emotions of climate breakdown.
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Editorial
Lily Jencks, Eszter Steierhoffer, and e-flux Architecture
Chronograms of Architecture is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Jencks Foundation within the context of their research program “'isms and 'wasms” that takes inspiration from Charles Jencks’s diagrams.
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Category
Feminism, Technology, Education, Drawing
Subject
Architecture, History, Time, Climate change, Critical Race Theory

Chronograms of Architecture is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House within the context of their research program “‘isms and ‘wasms.”

Contributors