Critical Modernism

"Charles Jencks has revamped his seminal tome on postmodernism". (Icon Magazine, June 2007) "The post man still delivers" (Building Design, April 2007) "Thirty years on from the publication of The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, its author explains why we're all modernists now." (BDonline, April 2007)

Charles Jencks is the well-known writer, landscape designer and author of the bestselling The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (re-issued as The New Paradigm in Architecture, 2002). He has also written numerous other books on contemporary arts and building, including The Architecture of the Jumping Universe (second edition, 1997), The Iconic Building (2005) and is the editor with Karl Kropf of Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture (second edition, 2006, also Wiley-Academy). His celebrated garden in Scotland is the subject of his book The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (2003) and in 2004 the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, won the Gulbenkian Prize for Museums for his design, Landform Ueda.

Preface - A refolution in five parts. Chapter 1 ORIGINS AND BATTLES. PM is Critical Modernism. The Many Deaths of Modernism. Two Views of Post-Modernism. Post-modern Speaks Us. Screams in the Cathedral. Modernism as a Protestant Crusade. Success Tames the Avant-garde. Chapter 2 HYBRID CULTURE. Double Coding and Irony. Not Even Pastiche. Complexity and the Enigmatic Signifier. Post-modern Art - Cross-coding with Content. Irony on the Verge of Cynicism. Chapter 3 THE BLURRED SOCIETY. The Rise of the Cognitariat. The Triumph of the Muddle Class. The Rise of Socitalism. Cyclical, Linear and Crystalline Time. Chapter 4 WANING NATIONS, RISING HETERARCHY. Destructive Modernity. The Transnational Heterarchy. New World Order as Heterarchy. Being Wise before the Event. The Post-modern States. One Cheer for the EU. The Search for an Effective Heterarchy. Chapter 5 COSMOGENESIS AND THE UNIVERSE PROJECT. Belief in a Universe 13.7 Billion Years Big. Complexity as a Measure of Quality. Two Types of Evolution. A Cultural Drive?. The Universe Project. A Jumping Universe. Chapter 6 CRITICAL MODERNISM. Creative to be Critical. A Critical Iconography. A Critical Coding. A Critical Spirituality? Critical Theory Carves up Doomsday Fatigue. Critical Modernism as a Continuous Dialectic. The White Elephant Theory of Modernism. The Ten-year Rule and Continuous Refolution. Hidden Tradition or Process? Critical Modernism - a Conscious Movement? Notes & References. Acknowledgements. Index.