1980 was a turning point in the history of state socialism in eastern Europe. 

1980 in Parallax: Architects and Acts of Solidarity 

1980 in Parallax: From Post-Modernism to Post-Modernisation in China

1980 in Parallax: Japan at Number One, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Riot in Lagos’

1980 in Parallax: On the Queerness of the AT&T Building

1980 in Parallax: Plaza de la Constitución, Post-Modernism, History and Propaganda in Pinochet’s Chile

1980 in Parallax: Provincialising Post-Modern Architecture

1980 in Parallax: Zbigniew Dmochowski in Nigeria

21 games you can play with a cosmic house

A Genealogy of Post-Modern Architecture

A World Wide Book: Charles Jencks and the Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 1977–1991

Digital technologies are now a fact of life; they are part to almost everything we do. 

A short but believable history of the digital turn in architecture

If necessity is the mother of invention, then combining previous systems is the father, and adhocism is the creative offspring.

An Adhocist Manifesto

I am not like Robert Venturi, an architect who criticises, but rather a critic who architects

An Internal Dialogue: Architect vs Critic

Architectural Library at The Cosmic House

Architecture is – acid mine drainage, acrylic, air pollution, aluminium, arsenic trioxide

Architecture is Climate 

Architecture of Our Time

Axonometric drawing of The Cosmic House

The goal of the diagram presented here is to offer a crude and concise history of Western architecture as a dialectic of base and superstructure.

Base and Superstructure: A Vulgar Survey of Western Architecture

‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going’. 

Charles Jencks: The Architect in the Jumping Universe

Chronograms of Architecture

Colosseum Chair and Domical Stool

Cosmic, Comic, Cosmetic

Cosmic, Comic, Cosmetic: Themes and Designs for a House (Sept 2021 - Sept 2022)

Cul-de-sac

When I went to see the critic Jencks for the first time, I didn’t know that he was an artist, designing his own house.

Cultural History Frieze at The Cosmic House

True Post-Modernists really do believe in a field of tensions, in the necessity for Traditional and Modern approaches to flourish

Death for Rebirth

Designs for Spring and Winter Fireplaces

Designs for the Rear Facade

Drawing of Solar Stair

Elemental House

Elevations Plan of the Architectural Library

Evolutionary Tree of Post-Modern Architecture

Evolutionary Tree to the Year 2000

Feminist Spatial Practices, Part 1

Garden of Cosmic Speculation

Guidebook for ‘The Presence of the Past’

Charles introduced me to Eduardo at the Royal Academy of Art café. On seeing an image of my bust of Leéon Krier, he immediately agreed to sit for me.

Hephaestus in The Cosmic House: Program and Process

Illustration for Charles Jencks’ Crawick Multiverse

Interview with Madelon Vriesendorp

Jencks Typeface

London Column at The Cosmic House

Léon Krier, Charles J. Wishing the P.M. World were a Lighter Thing to Carry

Madelon Vriesendorp: Cosmic Housework

Marysia Lewandowska: Histories Without a Voice

Marysia Lewandowska: how to pass through a door

Moonwell at The Cosmic House

In 1982 Charles Jencks asked me to design some glass for his new Post-Modern house in Lansdowne Walk. 

Moonwell, Zodiac Ballusterdiscs and Four Seasons Vignettes

The question we face today, like the one Jencks began to answer half a century ago, is how to ensure that the architectural eco-system continues to thrive

Multiform and the Legacies of Post-Modernism

Plan of the Ground Floor of The Cosmic House

According to the ancient definition of the word the edifices were for edification, but they were also Pop expressions of a new attitude to architecture meant to communicate. 

Post-Modern Classicism – The Ironic International Style

Post-Modernism: The True Inheritor of Modernism?

Raqs Media Collective Interview: 1980 in Parallax

Raqs Media Collective: 1980 In Parallax

Rem Koolhaas, Designs for Spring Room

Section of The Cosmic House

As Braque said: 'Reality only reveals itself when illuminated by a ray of poetry. All around us is asleep.'

Semiology and Architecture

Seventeen Themes of The Thematic House

Sketch for Conservatory Windows

Sketch for the Rear Facade of The Cosmic House

Sketches for Critics’ Corner

Sketches for Elemental House

Sketches for Spring and Winter Fireplaces

Solar Stair

Solar Stair at The Cosmic House

Sun Furniture for The Cosmic House

Symbolic Furniture

Symbolic Furniture Designs

Symbolic Furniture Press

Symbolic Programme for Autumn Room

Symbolic Programme for Spring Room

Symbolic Programme for Summer Room

Symbolic Programme for Winter Room

Symbolic Programmes for The Cosmic House

Symbolic Programmes for the Time Garden and Future Pavilion

Ten Notes on Post-Modernism

The Century is Over. Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture

The Cosmic House Mid-Construction

The Cosmic Oval at The Cosmic House

Some time in 1969, the 30-year-old critic and historian Charles Jencks made a blobby diagram

The Drawing that Ate Architecture

The Evolutionary Tree

The First Architecture Biennale in Venice, 1980

The Jencks Suite, Time Garden

The Jencksiana Symbol

What is Post-Modernism? That’s a tough one… famously so. But here’s an equally good question: what isn’t it?

The Presentness of the Past 

In our musée imaginaire, in our museum city that has recapitulated world history, styles have lost their overall meaning and become, instead, genres.

Towards a Radical Eclecticism

We have created a set of diagrams that limns the racial epistemologies operating within the foundations of architectural history

Visualising the Racial Epistemologies of the Architectural Canon

What is the purpose of the Garden? To refresh the heart. How? Through sense and imagination; engage emotions and mind. 

Voicing the Archive

What can you do with a Cosmic House?

History, particularly cultural history, tends to privilege narrative over fact. When you tell a good story, people tell it again.

What is/was Post-Modern (or Never Take the Marble for Granite)

Post-Modernism was a cognitive-affective challenge and opportunity, at once a new way of thinking and new way of being.

What is/was Post-Modern: Irony, Urgency (and So On)

Constantly re-written and visually reassessed, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture could be seen as an evolotome or an evolving treatise.

Writing ‘from the Battlefield’: Charles Jencks and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture

‘All the Wasms have Become Isms’, Booklet

‘All the Wasms have become Isms’: Slideshow

‘how to pass through a door’ as a question initially posed by Maggie to herself, can now act as an invitation acknowledging her cultural presence

‘how to pass through a door’ : an interview with Marysia Lewandowska

‘Chronograms of Architecture’ is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Jencks Foundation

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