Charles Jencks

Charles Alexander Jencks (born June 21, 1939) is a cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres. He has published over thirty books and became famous in the 1980s as theorist of Postmodernism. In recent years Jencks has devoted time to landform architecture, especially in Scotland. These landscapes include The Garden of Cosmic Speculation and Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh. His continuing project The Crawick Multiverse, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, opened in 2015 near Sanquahar in Scotland.

Born in Baltimore Maryland on June 21, 1939, Charles Alexander Jencks was the son of composer Gardner Platt Jencks and Ruth DeWitt Pearl. Jencks received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature at Harvard University in 1961 and a Master of Arts degree in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1965. In 1965 Jencks moved to the United Kingdom where he now has houses in Scotland and London. In 1970 Jencks received a PhD in architectural history, studying under the radical modernist Reyner Banham at University College, London. This thesis was the source for his Modern Movements in Architecture (1973) which criticised the suppression of some Modernist variations.

Jencks has two sons by his first marriage; one works as a landscape architect in Shanghai, while the other works for Jardines in Vietnam. He has two children by Maggie Keswick: John Jencks, a London-based filmmaker, married to Amy Agnew and Lily Clare Jencks, who in 2014 wed Roger Keeling. Jencks married Louisa Lane Fox as his third wife in 2006, and is thus the stepfather of her son Henry Lane Fox and daughter Martha Lane Fox.

Jencks' first architectural design was a studio in the woods, a cheap mass-produced garage structure of $5,000 – titled The Garagia Rotunda, where he spent part of the summers with his family. The ad hoc use of readymade materials was championed in his polemical text with Nathan Silver Adhocism – the Case for Improvisation in 1971 and 2013. Jencks' architectural designs experimented with ideas from complexity theory.

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