House blueprint art9/8/2023 Jencks wanted the house to be preserved and to remain as a vital and critical forum for the discussion of culture and cosmology, science and design and, together with his daughter Lily, they sketched out plans for the next phase of its life as a public space. In 2018 the house was listed at the highest level of protection, Grade I, in recognition as its status as a built manifesto for Post Modernism and a pivotal centre of global architectural culture. It became the de facto locus of PoMo where architects and friends from Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster to Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas and Madelon Vriesendorp debated the direction of modern architecture and design. The Cosmic House became a forum for Post-Modern ideas, a place for parties and dinners, discussion and debate. Treating the interior almost like the romantic gardens of the eighteenth century in which visitors would be taken on a walk through a narrative landscape filled with classical allusions and references to art and learning, Jencks created an interior which (mostly) suited both living and learning. Working with architect (Sir) Terry Farrell, their designs played with the formal early Victorian villa architecture of Holland Park and its conventions and motifs and remodelled the interior to create a complex scenography of stories and histories. Like Sir John Soane’s House, The Cosmic House has its own complex narrative, a story which unwinds as the visitor wanders around and in which the house itself becomes a character.Ĭharles and Maggie Jencks began work on the house in 1978 and set about transforming it into one of the most unique and remarkable domestic buildings of the late twentieth century. Both houses were intended as expressions of personality, ideas and as tools for teaching and illustrating the history and potential of architecture. The house might be seen as a contemporary parallel to Sir John Soane’s House completed a century and a half earlier. Rem Koolhaas was commissioned to design the Spring room, although the design was never executed as it was deemed not suitably symbolic. Works by Eduardo Paolozzi and Allen Jones are integral to the design of the interior. Michael Graves designed the fireplaces and Piers Gough the jacuzzi. It is a true PoMo Gesamtkunstwerk in which the Jenckses and their friends designed everything and integrated art, furniture and ideas into the architecture and design. The Cosmic House represents a synthesis of ideas about science and the arts embodied in everything from its front door to its furniture. Unusually for an interior of this period it remains substantially as it was designed, built and lived in with all its original bespoke furniture and fittings intact. The spaces are characteristically Post-Modern with multiple changes in levels, shifted axes, fragmented forms, architectural quotations, views obliquely across spaces and glimpses of neighbouring spaces enticing the visitor around the interior. Designed in collaboration with architect (Sir) Terry Farrell, and built between 19, the house became a forum for conversation and dialogue at the epicentre of the Post-Modern moment and the cultural discourse around ideas, history, science and aesthetics. Switching between pop and classical culture, between high art and accessible kitsch, it became a built manifesto for the architecture that emerged in reaction to the slowly solidifying canon of Modernism as it faded in the late mid-century. It is an architectural essay about our relationship to proportion, building, culture and the universe.ĭensely packed with ideas, symbols and motifs, its architecture embraces an entire cosmos of architectural allusion, history, metaphor and reference. An almost human character is imposed on the architecture with each element related to the human body and then to the larger cosmos. A hugely influential distillation of the ideas at the heart of Post-Modern thought in culture and science, it is a remarkable testament to the polymathic talents of Maggie and Charles Jencks.īuilt between 19 the house subverts the genteel architecture of Holland Park, exaggerating, caricaturing and embellishing the white stucco until it becomes a microcosm of contemporary architectural theory, semiotics and historiography. The Cosmic House is one of the key landmarks in the development of Post-Modernist architecture. Architecture and Design A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.-Charles Jencks
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