Charles Jencks, “The Architecture of the Multiverse”

Charles Jencks AB ’61 BArch ’65 is a cultural theorist, landscape designer, and architecture historian. Among his many influential books are Meaning in Architecture (1969), The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (with Nathan Silver, 1972), The Daydream Houses of Los Angeles (1978), Bizarre Architecture (1979), and The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (1997). He is also co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres, named for his late wife Maggie Keswick, and has written about this project in The Architecture of Hope (2015). Jencks has taught and lectured widely and served on numerous juries and selection committees; his work has been recognized with numerous awards and honorary degrees. As a landscape designer, Jencks has completed several projects in Scotland, including the Garden of Cosmic Speculation (2007) and Jupiter Artland (2010). In his lecture, he will speak about his ongoing project the Crawick Multiverse, about which he writes:

The cosmos is almost the measure of all things and provides a referent and subject, a focus otherwise hard to find in present day society. With a few architects the patterns of nature and the architecture of the universe have partly reemerged as a shared meaning and iconography. At the same time the Multiverse has emerged on the agenda among scientists. Is this now a subject of thought and ultimate meaning? I have explored it in the architecture of the multiverse, an unfinished project. Where it leads, the imagination follows.

[moniquekawecki]

Would have loved to listen for longer! Absolutely love Charles Jencks’ philosophy and views

[danglybit]

wonderful lecture...This is the antitheses of a lecture by Peter Eisenman..

[heyguysinternet]

75:55 From Jung's writings: "On the right it shows the familiar world. The pilgrim, who is evidently on a pélerinage de l'âme ["pilgrimage of the soul"], has broken through the star-strewn rim of his world and beholds another, supernatural universe filled with what look like layers of cloud or mountain ranges. In it appears the wheels of Ezekiel and disks or rainbowlike figures [Jencks' slide omits these details], obviously representing the 'heavenly spheres.' In these symbols we have a prototype of the Ufo vision, which is vouchsafed to the illuminati. They cannot be heavenly bodies belonging to our empirical world, but are projected 'rotunda' from the inner, four-dimensional world."