41 Quotes by Charles Jencks

…the nausea due to misunderstanding a language, the fear due to unfamiliarity with a style, the conflict of generations, are all mild examples of sign shock.

…every act, object and statement that man perceives is meaningful (even “nothing”) and […] the frontiers of meaning are always, momentarily, in state of collapse and paradox.

There is an unalterable and widening gap between exterior and interior, symbol and content, form and function -a gap which is making the environment more and more inarticulate, impossible to understand and difficult to manipulate.

The act of posting a letter would become too complex with significance: a walk down the stair-way, over the door-stop, on to the side-walk, across the pave-ment and over to the mail-box. Common objects would dissolve into their primal states, each having an independent life.

Whereas art critics are ready to accept-indeed are looking for-the new fabrication of a consistent visual language, architectural critics, like the general public, are much more conservative and unwilling to accept the introduction of new codes.

…semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of “meaning” as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

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.

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.

If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.