Quotes by Charles Jencks

About Charles Jencks:

Charles Alexander Jencks is an American architecture theorist and critic, landscape architect and designer. His books on the history and criticism of modernism and postmodernism are widely read in architectural circles. He studied under the influential architectural historians Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham. Jencks now lives in Scotland where he designs landscape sculpture.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Charles Jencks

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 compute...

Charles Jencks

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

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

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 a...

Charles Jencks

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 m...

Charles Jencks

I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

Charles Jencks

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 buildi...

Charles Jencks

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

Charles Jencks

In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

Charles Jencks

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

Charles Jencks

If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.

Charles Jencks

You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evol...

Charles Jencks

Europe has been in my bones.

Charles Jencks

What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.

Charles Jencks

Can't you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?

Charles Jencks

Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

Charles Jencks

The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.

Charles Jencks

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

Charles Jencks

Author Bio

  • NameCharles Jencks
  • DescriptionArchitecture theorist, critic and landscape architect
  • Born1939
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionArchitect; Historian