Synopsis
This text discusses the basic ideas of complexity and chaos theories and presents many examples of architecture based on these ideas in the work of leading architects - Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Charles Correa and Itsuko Hasegawa - along with ecological and organic designs. Charles Jenck's own recent work is used to illustrate concepts in physics and an architecture based on waves and twists. This work both advocates and criticizes as it seeks to define a new direction for the contemporary arts.
From the Inside Flap
The Architecture of the Jumping Universe A Polemic How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture A new world view, influenced by current science, shows the universe to be more creative and dynamic than previously thought. This shift in thinking, Charles Jencks argues, is from a traditional religious perspective to a cosmogenic orientation: the view that we inhabit a self-organizing universe in which the mind and culture are understood to be not accidental but typical of its creativity. How might this view change architecture and culture? In this, the second edition, Jencks makes the case that the recently formulated Complexity Theory and theory of a creative cosmogenesis offer a basic answer. Architecture might reflect the processes of the universe, its energy, its growths and sudden leaps, its beautiful twists, curls and turns; its catastrophes. The book presents the basic ideas of the Sciences of Complexity and shows many buildings based on this new language by leading architects (such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind) along with ecological and organic designs. Jencks' own recent work is used to illustrate concepts in physics and an architecture based on waves, twists and fractals. The second edition shows the movement of Nonlinear Architecture gathering momentum in different parts of the world with notable buildings completed in Australia, Japan, Germany and America. This friendly polemic, in a long tradition of partisan manifestoes, both advocates and criticizes as it seeks to define a new direction for the contemporary arts. It defines the challenge of a new spiritual culture, based on the twin concepts of cosmogenesis and the emergence of ever higher levels of sensitivity and organization. Otto Rank said that if you want to know the soul of a culture you go to its architecture. Charles Jencks, with wit, passion and a broad outlook, lays down the challenge to our culture - and architects - to express the emerging cosmology in their life and work. By daring to tackle the deep questions: How to counter depthlessness? What is civic life today? In what style are we to build? he challenges architects and citizens to engage in the great debate about who we are and to what we aspire. This book honours not only architectural space and cosmic space but soul space. It is spirited and refreshing, a demand that we join the jumping universe and thereby reinvent our work - in particular the work of architecture. Matthew Fox, author of The Reinvention of Work, Original Blessing and The Coming of the Cosmic Christ
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