1. Charles Alexander Jencks was an American cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie's Cancer Care Centres.
20 Facts About Charles Jencks
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Charles Jencks published over thirty books and became famous in the 1980s as a theorist of postmodernism.
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Charles Jencks's continuing project Crawick Multiverse, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, opened in 2015 near Sanquhar.
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In 1965 Charles Jencks moved to the United Kingdom where he had houses in Scotland and London.
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In 1970, Charles Jencks received a PhD in architectural history, studying under the noted historian Reyner Banham at University College, London.
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Charles Jencks married Pamela Balding in 1961 and the marriage ended in 1973.
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Charles Jencks married secondly to Maggie Keswick Jencks, daughter of Sir John Keswick and Clare Elwes, by whom he had two children: John Keswick Jencks, a London-based filmmaker, married to Amy Agnew, and Lily Clare Jencks, who married Roger Keeling in 2014.
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Charles Jencks married Louisa Lane Fox as his third wife in 2006, and was thus the stepfather of her son Henry Lane Fox and daughter Martha Lane Fox.
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Charles Jencks designed his own London house in tandem with Maggie Keswick and postmodern architects including Terry Farrell and Michael Graves.
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Maggie Keswick Charles Jencks is the author of the book The Chinese Garden, on which her husband worked.
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From 2010, Charles Jencks started work on the Crawick Multiverse, a fifty-five-acre site in southwest Scotland and completed it in 2015.
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Charles Jencks' goal was to celebrate nature, but he incorporated elements from the modern sciences into the design.
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Charles Jencks believed that contemporary science is potentially a great moving force for creativity, because it tells us the truth about the way the universe is and shows us the patterns of beauty.
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Charles Jencks's many landforms are based on the idea that landform building is a radical hybrid activity combining gardens, landscape, urbanism, architecture, sculpture, and epigraphy.
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Charles Jencks was a furniture designer and sculptor, completing DNA sculptures at Kew Gardens in 2003 and Cambridge University in 2005.
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Charles Jencks discussed his theories of postmodern architecture in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, which ran to seven editions.
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Charles Jencks examined the paradigm shift from modern to postmodern architecture, claiming that modern architecture concentrates on univalent forms such as right angles and square buildings often resembling office buildings.
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In Meaning in Architecture, 1969, co-edited with George Baird, a hypertext of leading architects and theorists commenting on each other's texts, Charles Jencks addressed issues of who is the ultimate user of architecture, what values should be crystallised in architecture, and what public architecture should represent.
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Charles Jencks claimed that the reason that modern culture seeks the "iconic building" is because it has the possibility of reversing the economic trend of a flagging "conurbation".
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Charles Jencks appeared on television programmes in the US and UK, and he wrote two feature films for the BBC.