Words matter. These are the best Charles Jencks Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.
Europe has been in my bones.
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.
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.
Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm.
What is the most interesting thing to people? Other people.
In 1979, postmodernism lost its understanding of the meaning of ornament. It degenerated into kitsch applique.
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.
I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.
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.
It’s a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.
I’ve been a lucky man. I’ve only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995.
Can’t you see, we are in a dialogue with the universe?
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.
