Quotes from Charles Jencks

Europe has been in my bones.

You know, Darwin said through natural selection things go gradually, and he was talking about pigeon's evolution or horses evolving, getting faster. But in fact if you look at evolution on a bigger scale, cosmic evolution and you look at culture evolution you see it jumps, it goes through phase changes, and that's very exciting.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'd been to Stourhead and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art; in fact, the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called 'Not Sculpture Park,' because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Cult of Reason sprang up all over France in 1793 and was even worshipped in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. After the Bishop of Paris resigned, proclaiming his previous error of supporting Christianity, the Goddess of Reason, impersonated by an actress of wealthy means, took his place at the altar. She sat under a baldachino holding the new symbols of power, while all around her danced Jacobins in various states of religious, revolutionary and reasoned ecstasy.

Like politicians, they may pretend to be in charge and shape society – this is a large part of their hope and mental equipment – but it is mostly an accident if they do so.

the philosopher Karl Popper and his ally Ernst Gombrich, wrote many critiques of the zeitgeist and argued that although there is no such thing as historical inevitability, there most certainly is a 'logic of the situation and climate of opinion', and morality consists in resisting those pressures when they are socially negative. In architecture this syndrome became the alliance of mass production with mass urban renewal, cheap housing and overcrowding.

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.

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…