Cosmic Proportions

Over five years, he transformed the four-story 1840s mansion beyond recognition, making it into an ambitious, sublimely eccentric and at times farcical feat of imagination. Wanting to reestablish the importance of art in architecture, Jencks saw the house as “one giant symbol” whose references range from ancient Egyptian cosmology to Hindu temples, the Italian Baroque, Orphic mythology and ad-hocism. Every detail of the home was planned and constructed to carry symbolic meaning—rooms for each season; a spiraling “Solar Stair” with fifty-two steps for the weeks of the year; a crescent-shaped, mirrored “moonwell”; custom furniture; a spectacular sunken bathroom, the tiles bearing the same stepped design as the typeface on the door.

A journey into this Jencksian fantasia begins in the cocooning embrace of the “Cosmic Oval,” where I briefly had the impression that I was taking part in a cult initiation. The mystic egg-shaped entryway references a polyphony of narratives about the origins of the universe and civilization, emphasizing Jencks’s conviction that “Post-Modern first of all means pluralism.” The ovular floor beneath my feet was inlaid with a pattern that echoed the Piedmontese Baroque designs of Italian architect and philosopher Guarino Guarini, famed for the dome of San Lorenzo in Turin, whose intricate geometry, Guarini said, was intended to evoke the “terror of the human soul.” Gazing up, you encounter a William Stok frieze depicting a kind of cosmic Last Supper—I spotted Erasmus, Hadrian, John Donne, Hannah Arendt and Thomas Jefferson, an unlikely crew. This confluence of cultural figures from across history represents mankind’s millennia-long struggle for meaning, and the presence of figures such as Imhotep and Prince Hirohito points to Jencks’s belief in postmodernism as the end of Western cultural domination.

The next room I encountered, as I hung up my coat, was smaller but equally as theatrical: Behind mirrored doors lay the “Cosmic Loo”—a more playful and bodily center from which to contemplate the origins of existence. Under a glass pyramid ceiling, the walls were adorned not with a frieze but instead with totems of a more personal kind, postcards collected from travels. The toilet has two levers, but only one works. It seemed like a scene from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the toilet had been able to turn excrement into gold. Such moments of levity, I discovered, are another of Jencks’s signatures. Throughout the house, pairs and doubles appear continually—handles, sinks, even soap dishes—tropes meant partially to reflect the imperfect symmetry of the human body. But doubling also functions as a kind of subterfuge, making the visitor feel somehow wrong-footed around almost every corner.

“Why put two front-door knobs on if you’re not going to be provocative?” architect Piers Gough said of Jencks’s work. “He was always flummoxing people and making them feel they didn’t really know what was going on.” Elsewhere in the house, cheap MDF wallboard is hand painted to look like expensive polychromatic marble. Stately columns preposterously hold up nothing (“like the UK economy,” my tour guide quipped). The home is packed with replicas and imitations: the triglyphs of the Parthenon; a jacuzzi in the form of an upside-down imitation of a Renaissance dome by Francesco Borromini. The effect is destabilizing. Nothing is quite what it seems.

This quirky introduction sets the stage, and the house’s treasures begin to spool out through the ground floor’s interconnected living spaces. The four rooms designed to represent the seasons are positioned around the central Solar Stair. The first room is Winter, a dark and somber space dominated by an imposing bust of Hephaestus, the god of fire, made by sculptor Celia Scott, who arranged sittings with Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi and modeled the bust on his head. The bust presides over a Michael Graves-designed fireplace, around which sit a cluster of Gongshi, or Chinese scholar’s rocks. The Cosmic House boasts an impressive collection of these karstic limestone pieces, a feature of Chinese gardens on which Maggie Jencks was an expert. Her 1978 book, The Chinese Garden, was the first significant publication on the subject in English.

The mood shifts abruptly to Spring in the bright adjoining living space, framed by teal drapes. Three busts loom over another Graves fireplace, representing the three months of spring and the three ages of Venus. Rem Koolhaas and artist Madelon Vriesendorp, who was at the time Koolhaas’s wife, submitted designs to Jencks for this room, but they were rejected for not being “symbolic enough.” The couple nonetheless remained close friends of the family, and Vriesendorp continued to collaborate with Charles.

It was on the curving yellow sofa of the Spring room, with a sunken sundial seat bathed in natural light from an enormous south-facing window, that I found the Cosmic House’s director, Eszter Steierhoffer. Formerly a senior curator at London’s Design Museum, she recalled being just as blown away as I was the first time she visited the house, as a student at the Royal College of Art.

As both a property of special national architectural interest and a fragile domestic space in a residential area, the Cosmic House presents unique challenges as a museum. Three days a week, it accepts two or three groups of up to fifteen people. Tickets (priced at £8) are released on the third Friday of every month. “We deal with a number of limitations as a Grade–I listed building, and it is hard to accommodate everyone wanting to get in,” Steierhoffer said. “We aim to be more inclusive through our exhibition and learning programs that expand beyond the physical boundaries of the building.” Yet those who do manage to visit are invited to meander through almost all of the rooms and to use the space actively, unusual freedoms for a house museum. “Gentle knocking is encouraged,” Steierhoffer says.

The house is not intended to be a “mausoleum to Charles” but instead a “generative archive” to keep his “ideas and attitudes alive, and keep the space as convivial as possible.” As I made my way around, I noticed how distinct the atmosphere was from that of most house museums I’d visited. Staff members were at work on laptops at the dining table, making tea in the kitchen and answering emails from an upstairs bedroom.

I continued my tour with Steierhoffer, who described her job as challenging the ideas contained in the house as much as preserving them. An entire generation after Jencks, she acknowledged, “took issue with his aesthetic.” And the house—as well as the ideas that built it—contains flaws and failures. Jencks’s opposition to Western cultural hegemony, for example, didn’t always go the distance. The kitchen, representing autumn, reductively turns “Indian architecture into Indian summer,” as Steierhoffer described it. Some visitors may find the appropriation of architectural aspects of Hindu temples, such as the classical triglyphs fashioned onto salad spoons, especially distasteful. Jencks had a favorite quip for such judgments: “If you can’t take the kitsch—get out of the kitchen.”

“The house is the product of a certain moment in history,” Steierhoffer told me. “Our program aims to reengage with Charles’s ideas and debate them in the contemporary discourse.” Steierhoffer has kept the ideas vibrating in part by inviting contemporary artists, writers, researchers and residents from different disciplines to respond to them. The house also hosts salon discussions whose participants are invited to sleep in the former nanny’s room. In 2023, Vriesendorp installed pieces throughout the house for an exhibition cheekily titled “Cosmic Housework.” A furniture commission by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, a table and chairs in searing blue, temporarily occupied Maggie’s study. Tai Shani, a Turner-Prize-winning artist, created an eerie installation for the house’s basement gallery in 2024, composed of fleshy and surreal paintings and hybrid sculptures that responded to Jencks’s anthropomorphic architecture.

The house’s transcendent and transportive nature makes Jencks feel eerily present during a visit. One of the most popular rooms in the house is his study, where his architecture library is housed in bookcases that are shaped like buildings, visual representations of the books they hold. The filing cabinets—which Jencks, always a fan of a good pun, called “slidescrapers”—are covered and painted to look like wood. Vestiges of Jencks’s daily life are more prominent here: Books are stuffed into shelves, annotated with notes and mementos; a picture of Zaha Hadid peeks out from the pages of one volume. One of the slidescraper drawers contains some of the confections Jencks used to enjoy.

Writer Edwin Heathcote, who holds the wonderfully exalted title of Keeper of Meaning for the Cosmic House and serves as the chair of its steering group, first came to the house while working on a book with Charles. “For me,” he said, “the library is the most entrancing room in the house—the idea that the bookshelves could become a kind of architecture reflecting the subject matter of the volumes stored on them. It’s poetic, provocative and excessive . . . which pretty much captures the house for me.”

Surveying the house’s jagged geometries, cast-concrete stairwells and dense, ornate decor, it’s hard to imagine the Jencks family moving in with children who were three and five at the time. Cosmic House residence was not for the pusillanimous; after even an hour, it becomes dizzying. Admitting that he sometimes went “too far in over-designing certain rooms” and that the house was “ugly and overdone” in parts, Jencks once said in an interview: “We wanted to see how we could push it—where symbolism would break down.”

There are hints at a rebellion against the regime: Maggie’s study is a simple, spartan room, and the only part of the house that is not listed Grade I. The symbolism, she once told Charles, “stops at my door.” As Heathcote says, “It absolutely wasn’t to everyone’s taste.” But it’s nonetheless impossible not to be awestruck by the house’s sheer audacity and by Jencks’s commitment to manifest in brick and mortar the “intense delight in his own mind,” as Gough puts it. It is architecture as self-portrait, a time capsule of ideas, the diary of a voracious intellect.

As I left this redoubt of the postmodern and stepped back out into the grayish uniformity of the Victorian terraced houses that surround it, my eyes scanned instinctively for symbols embedded in their surfaces. But the buildings only stared back blankly. I wondered what could be behind their doors, and I felt briefly disoriented. I couldn’t help but agree with Jencks: “Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is—certain, even dogmatic—until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.”

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In 2025, the Cosmic House will launch a new events program to invite active dialogue among its supporters while furthering its work as an educational charity. For more information, visit the Jencks Foundation at jencksfoundation.org.

Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan author, journalist and critic. Jansen writes about art and photography for The Guardian, The New York Times and British Vogue, among other publications. She is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze and Photography Now.