Marina's Masters

vrijdag 3 juli 2009

An Interview With Architect Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks is the author of several books on art and architecture. In 2004 he won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums with his design for Landform Ueda.
His most recent book is The Iconic Building.

One can discern the beginnings of a shift in architecture that relates to a deep transformation going on in the sciences and in time will permeate all other areas of life. The new sciences of complexity - fractals, nonlinear dynamics, the new cosmology, self-organizing systems - have brought about the change in perspective. We have moved from a mechanistic view of the universe to one that is self-organizing at all levels, from the atom to the galaxy.
Illuminated by the computer, this new worldview is paralleled by changes now occurring in architecture.

The plurality of styles is a keynote. This reflects an underlying concern for the increasing pluralism of global cities. Growing out of post-modern complexity of the sixties and seventies - Jane Jacobs and Robert Venturi - is the complexity theory of the 1980s:
Pluralism leads to conflict, the inclusion of opposite tastes and composite goals, a melting and boiling pot. Modernist purity and reduction could not handle this reality very well.

The Death of God, like the death of other major narratives over the last hundred years, may be confined to the west, especially visible now that the globe is experiencing the ultimate clash of civilizations. But fundamentalisms, either American or Other, are not living cultural movements however powerful they may be. They have produced no art, architecture or writing worth preserving, and the deeper problems remain. In spite of these problems, the question of whether the new paradigm exists in architecture is worth asking. What we’re seeing may be a false start; the old paradigm of Modernism can easily reassert its hegemony, as it is lurking behind every Blair and Bush. But a wind is stirring architecture; at least it is the beginning of a shift in theory and practice.