interview with Charles Jencks

sig and justin are interested in this:

[clip from an interview with Charles Jencks, author of The Iconic Building]

Modern man lacks a mythology that incorporates our latest discoveries in science, but you make an eloquent case for something called “cosmogenesis.” Would you please tell us what that is and how it manifests itself in architecture?

"Cosmogenesis" has a 150 year history as a word. It is picked up by Teilhard, de Chardin, Thomas Berry and Harvard physicists. It has come to mean the universe as a continuous, unfolding event (i.e. a genesis, by a cosmic process lasting 13.7 billion years). This is the shift in worldview that sees nature and culture as growing out of the narrative of the universe. In a global culture of conflict this narrative provides a possible direction and iconography that transcend national and sectarian interests. Several architects are involved at different levels.

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."

Read the full interview here.