![]() ![]() ![]() This substantial 1840s end-of-terrace house has become a wondrous, indigestible cacophony of cosmic symbolism, classical references and architectural in-jokes. The answer is beyond anything you might imagine. “We wanted to see how far we could push it.” “We tried to experiment on ourselves and bring symbolic architecture back,” Jencks says, in an introductory video to the house, which is open to 15 visitors at a time in pre-booked slots, three days a week. As the godfather and chief promoter of postmodernism, or pomo, he spent a lifetime championing eclecticism, wit and meaning over what he saw as the bland, faceless tedium of modernism. His Cosmic House, as 19 Lansdowne Walk is known – which opens to the public this Friday, two years after his death – stands as a madcap monument to his voracious appetite for ideas. There’s a lot to digest already – and you’ve barely stepped through the front door.Īs an architecture critic, cosmic landscape designer and all-round polymathic funster, Jencks was never one for half measures. ![]() The faces of Pythagoras, Erasmus and Hannah Arendt peer down from a mural, above a frieze of gnomic inscriptions about the cosmos. Push the correct one and you enter a bewildering oval lobby lined with numerous mirrored doors and topped with a ceiling of intersecting ovals that appears to taper upwards to infinity. Two identical brass fixtures flank the entrance to 19 Lansdowne Walk in Holland Park, the first indication that this is no ordinary west London pile. T he first challenge facing visitors to Charles Jencks’s house is choosing which knob to push on the front door. ![]()
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