Charles Jencks Quotes

#1. I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

Charles Jencks

#2. The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

Charles Jencks

#3. If you can't take the kitsch, get out of the kitchen.

Charles Jencks

#4. I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

Charles Jencks

#5. Mies van der Rohe's architecture and modern architecture in general suffered from not only being repetitive, but not explaining to the populous what the different rooms were for.

Charles Jencks

#6. Europe has been in my bones.

Charles Jencks

#7. The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant.

Charles Jencks

#8. Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

Charles Jencks

#9. I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

Charles Jencks

#10. What is a garden if not a miniaturization and celebration, of the place we are in, the universe?

Charles Jencks

#11. A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.

Charles Jencks

#12. What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.

Charles Jencks

#13. Can't you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?

Charles Jencks

#14. It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

Charles Jencks

#15. I've been a lucky man. I've only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.

Charles Jencks

#16. Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.

Charles Jencks

#17. Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.

Charles Jencks

#18. Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

Charles Jencks

#19. In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.

Charles Jencks

#20. Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

Charles Jencks

#21. A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

Charles Jencks

#22. The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.

Charles Jencks

#23. You have to believe in a placebo or it won't work, but if it works, it's obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

Charles Jencks