Architectural historian, academic and champion of postmodernism who co-founded Maggie’s Centres to offer support to cancer sufferers
October 16 2019, 12:01am,
The Times
Charles Jencks in 2015 at Crawick Multiverse, a land art installation that he developed on the site of a former open-cast coalmine in Dumfries and Galloway
Charles Jencks in 2015 at Crawick Multiverse, a land art installation that he developed on the site of a former open-cast coalmine in Dumfries and Galloway
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Maggie Keswick Jencks had just been told that she had three months to live. The silence that followed was broken by the doctor saying that there were other patients waiting. She was then ushered into a busy hospital corridor.
Maggie would live for another two years, giving her and her husband, Charles Jencks, precious time to envision a new type of cancer support centre that would enable terminally ill people to live out the rest of their lives in a more welcoming environment than amid the harsh strip-lighting, uncomfortable plastic chairs and impersonal corridors that she had to endure.
Days before Maggie died of breast cancer in June 1995, she and Charles sat on a bed and unfolded the designs for the first Maggie’s Centre, where people could retreat to after visiting the nearby Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. The building, designed by Richard Murphy, was opened in 1996.
As one of the world’s most respected architectural theorists, Charles Jencks evangelised for his wife’s idea among the world-famous architects in his contacts book. They queued up to help, waiving their usual stellar fees. Frank Gehry designed a Maggie’s Centre in Dundee in 2003; Zaha Hadid, one in Kircaldy, Fife, in 2006; Richard Rogers, one in Hammersmith, west London, which won the Stirling Prize, in 2009; and Norman Foster, one in Manchester in 2016. Each would be identifiable by the signature motifs of their designers, but were essentially simple spaces, designed around a central kitchen hub where people could drink tea and talk.
The 26 Maggie’s Centres are also a testament to Jencks’s manifesto to encourage a more thoughtful architectural language, rooted in setting, history and context. The US-born theorist was arguably the chief prophet of Post-Modernism (he always insisted on a capital P and hyphenation) with his bestselling 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.
Its famous opening line rejoices in the demolition of the vast, hideously ugly Pruitt-Igoe housing project in America: “Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32pm (or thereabouts).”
The monumental blocks represented everything that was iniquitous about the modern movement that had started in the early 20th century and dominated postwar town planning of serried, pared-down housing blocks and office towers. Jencks argued that architecture was too important to be hijacked by one movement, however well-meaning, in the name of social progress. He called for pluralism and ornamentation; the discipline must reconnect with history so that buildings could become legible again.
Tall with an elegant attire topped by a fedora, Jencks was as stylish as the celebrated house he rebuilt in Holland Park that was grade I listed in 2018.
He revelled in publicly debating with heavyweights from the architecture world, his friendliness and openness making him the ideal polemicist. He never allowed himself to be drawn into childish feuds. Neither was he chained to orthodoxy, even arguing that the great Swiss modernist Le Corbusier had shown postmodernist tendencies in designing the Ronchamp chapel.
Above all, Jencks’s writing had a powerful influence on the built environment. The tag he helped to popularise gave its name to some of the most flamboyant and controversial buildings of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Terry Farrell’s Charing Cross station. With Britain in the grip of a building boom during the Thatcher years, luridly coloured shopping centres sprang up with ironic historical references such as classical pediments or Egyptian-style columns. If these were the worst excesses of the movement, Jencks preached a deeper, more lyrical sensibility steeped in his preoccupation with cosmology.
In his sixties Jencks would create his own body of work to explore his ideas about the universe after reinventing himself as a landscape architect. This started when his wife encouraged him to design the garden of their home, Portrack House, Dumfriesshire.
The result was the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in 2003. He and Maggie, herself a renowned garden designer, collaborated on the concept to create monumental depictions of black holes, fractals, DNA, chaos theory and the double helix, sprawled over 12 hectares. Jencks then persuaded his wife to convert a swamp on the estate into a swimming lake. “She had been considering buying a Hockney,” Jencks said. “I said this would be much cheaper and nobody could steal it.”
Not content with one universe, Jencks persuaded the Duke of Buccleuch to fund a project to convert a former open-cast mine near Sanquhar, Dumfries and Galloway, into a 55-acre landform. Crawick Multiverse is a series of hills and walkways that represent many universes.
Jencks would confidently expound on such abstruse concepts with astrophysicists at the symposiums that the duke hosted at Drumlanrig Castle. He held his own. “I loved his openness to barmy ideas,” said Clive Aslet, who interviewed Jencks for the Financial Times in 2015. “ He spoke with a light Maryland drawl. A Brit wouldn’t have got away with it.”
The Black Hole terrace at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation
The Black Hole terrace at the Garden of Cosmic Speculation
ALAMY
Charles Alexander Jencks was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1939 into a wealthy family that had made its fortune from safety-deposit boxes. His father, Gardner Platt Jencks, was a composer and his mother was Ruth DeWitt Pearl. He attended Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, and studied English at Harvard, staying on to do a master’s in architecture. In 1965 he moved to the UK to study for a doctorate in architectural history at University College London.
Jencks’s thesis was in 1973 adapted into Modern Movements in Architecture, which claimed that some variations on modernist ideas were being suppressed. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture matured his ideas of how architecture should evolve, which he explored farther in 1980 with his contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale, which has been cited as a turning point for architecture. Jencks would write more than 30 books.
His first marriage to Pamela Balding in 1960 ended in 1973. He is survived by their two sons; Cosimo works for the conglomerate Jardine Matheson in Vietnam and Justin works as a landscape designer in Shanghai.
Charles Jencks’s Life Mounds at Jupiter Artland sculpture park and art gallery near Edinburgh
Charles Jencks’s Life Mounds at Jupiter Artland sculpture park and art gallery near Edinburgh
TIMES NEWSPAPERS
In 1978 Jencks married Maggie Keswick, a landscape designer and scion of the Scottish family that owns Jardine Matheson. They met at the Architectural Association in London, where he was teaching and she was a student. He is survived by their son, John, a film-maker, and Lily, an architect. In 2006 he married Louisa Lane Fox, the mother of Henry and Martha Lane Fox (Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho), the founder of lastminute.com.
Jencks lectured around the world. His friend Magnus Linklater recalled attending a lecture by Jencks that was scheduled for 90 minutes and lasted for three hours. “He was infectious, gregarious, unstoppable and would talk till the cows came home,” Linklater said.
Recognised as one of Britain’s leading landscape architects, Jencks picked up commissions around the world. One of his last big projects was Northumberlandia (2012), a sculpture of a reclining woman that is thought to be the largest depiction of a female form in the world.
A lover of geology who collected rocks, Jencks was also an inveterate categoriser of architecture. His library was housed at the Victorian house in Holland Park, London, that he reconfigured with the help of the architect Terry Farrell. In it is a Jacuzzi created by Piers Gough that is an inversion of the dome of Borromini’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. “Heaven is sitting in a Jacuzzi by Borromini eating foie gras,” Jencks said.
Jencks kept his library on the history of architecture in bookshelves shaped like a building from the period the volumes represented. The house is wittily filled to the brim with objects and designs, rather in the manner of Sir John Soane’s Museum in Holborn. As with the home of the Georgian architect, whom Jencks resembled in his entrepreneurism of ideas, there are plans to open the house to the public.
He loved giving personal tours of the house. Maggie indulged him to a point at which there was a door on which was attached a sign reading: “Post-Modernism stops here.”
Charles Jencks, architectural historian, was born on June 21, 1939. He died of cancer on October 13, 2019, aged 80
