CHARLES JENCKS
Divides his time between lecturing, writing, and designing in the USA, the UK, and Europe.
He is the author of The Architecture of Hope (2015), best-seller The Language of PostModern Architecture (re-issued as The New Paradigm in Architecture, 2002). He has also
written numerous other books on contemporary arts and building, including What is PostModernism? (fourth edition, 1995) and The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (second
edition, 1997). His celebrated garden in Scotland is the subject of his book The Garden of
Cosmic Speculation (Frances Lincoln, 2003) and in 2004 the Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art, Edinburgh, won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums for his design, Landform
Ueda. Landform projects have also been completed in Europe, and his current concern is
working with Cern on an iconographic and green project. He is the author of The Iconic
Building, the Power of Enigma, (Frances Lincoln, 2005), Critical Modernism, (Wiley 2007),
and The Architecture of Hope, on Maggie’s Centres, revised and rewritten 2nd edition
(published Frances Lincoln 2015). The Story of Post-Modernism, Five Decades of Ironic, Iconic
and Critical Architecture (Wiley, 2011) brings this resurgent tradition up to date while his
recent landscape work is summarised in The Universe in the Landscape (Frances Lincoln,
2011). The adhoc sculpture Metaphysical Landscapes was exhibited at Jupiter Artland
outside Edinburgh in 2011. Charles most recent landart project The Crawick Multiverse,
commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, opened in Kirkconnel, Scotland in June 2015.
ABSTRACT | THE ARCHITECTURE OF HOPE  THE STORY OF MAGGIE’S CENTRE’S
Hope is a project for a better future. But hope contains within itself the
possibility, and fear, of failure. Hope is a social chain that needs continual
renewal. It is a projection to the horizon of the future, entailing willpower, effort,
invention and skill in realizing the goal. And so it is not the same as optimism, or
a punt on the stock market. Napolean said, ‘A leader is a dealer in hope’;
architects and doctors work as its midwife.
Hope is the promise of spring felt at midwinter. That is why so many stone circles
are oriented towards the south-west. From the shortest day (21 December)
onwards, things can only get warmer, a hope also signaled by the early arrival of
tree buds or swallows. Birdsong following winter cheer us up, birds are a
constant sign of hope, and they learn new songs every spring to get the bird.
Cultural and natural signs of hope contain a promise, an implicit covenant
between us and the other. What is the promise, after a death sentence, of a stay
of execution? Who, and what, can make it?
The Architecture of Hope is the story of cancer caring centres and how they have
grown in Britain and elsewhere to become a new kind of institution. Located next
to a large hospital, each Maggie’s Centre is a personal, designed place that
encourages self-help. The buildings look at the same time striking yet familiar,
and their hybrid functional nature has great implications for mass-health today.
Each centre is like a house that is not a home, an existentialist church that is
nondenominational, a hospital that is a non-institution, and a place of art that is
a non-museum.
The idea started off, modestly, in 1994, when my late wife Maggie Jencks and I
thought of converting a room at the end of a hospital corridor in Edinburgh into
one small haven for cancer patients, with a view on to nature, where one could
sit peacefully between bouts of noxious therapy. In twenty years it has grown
into more than twenty buildings with gardens, and a developed programme of
caring activities that help cancer patients help themselves. Maggie would have
been amazed at this extraordinary growth, because we only planned one
building before she died in 1995; but she did have an inkling of the future, since
she wrote a general blueprint for caring centres. What explains their runaway
growth, and success?