10 Quotes & Sayings By Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks was born in 1943. He studied architecture at Cambridge University and has worked in London, Paris, and New York. He has taught at the Architectural Association, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He was made a CBE in 1995 for services to architecture and to education. He is the author of numerous books, including "High Street"(1983), Visionary Southwark (1986), Wittenoom (1991), A Family History (1993), The Urban Age (1994), The Longest Shadow (1995), The Backdrop (1997), Fictional Architecture (1998), The Style of the Present (2000) and The World in 24 Buildings (2002) Read more

He edited the Thames & Hudson Complete Works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh series in addition to editing David Chipperfield's landmark book on Frank Lloyd Wright's work. He is currently working on a book about English architecture in reaction to post modernism, which will be published by Phaidon Press in 2010. He is married to artist Kate Prentice. They have two daughters.

1
Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away. Charles Jencks
2
If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity. Charles Jencks
3
I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park, ' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down. Charles Jencks
4
I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational. Charles Jencks
5
Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for. Charles Jencks
6
Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite. Charles Jencks
7
The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way. Charles Jencks
8
A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases. Charles Jencks
9
If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts. Charles Jencks