‘He is one of the fixed stars of the critical firmament now, almost certainly doomed to receive an AIA medal and – dammit – he's 42!’

Reyner Banham, 1980

Declared an enfant terrible early on in his career, Charles Jencks never did suffer the fate of unanimous institutional and professional acceptance predicted by his mentor. As a perpetual trend-spotter, polemicist and critic who remained obsessively up to date, he endured as a ‘historian of what happened between his last two heart beats’ and, throughout the course of his life, continually outran the younger and more terrible enfants that approached from behind.

Having moved to London in 1965 to pursue his PhD at University College London with Reyner Banham, Jencks began teaching at the Architectural Association in 1967 as part of the Department of Arts and History. Later becoming General Studies under Alvin Boyarsky, the prospectus notes that these courses ‘tend to reflect the enthusiasm of their organisers’ and that ‘no attempt is made to cover areas of knowledge, however useful or beneficial they might seem to be’. As an exceptionally committed and enthusiastic organiser, it is fair to suggest that Jencks’ courses were responsible for benefitting and improving the knowledge of countless students that passed through the school for more than two decades in his role as a tutor, and many more subsequently as he continued to give regular guest lectures.

It was at the AA during these years that two seminal events in his life almost coincided. Writing for the quarterly journal in 1975, Jencks first, and reluctantly, coined the term ‘Post Modern’. Though initially dissatisfied with the negative prefix, the capital P and M were put in place and the hyphen would soon follow as ‘Post-Modernism’ took on a life of its own, guided, moderated and interrogated by its godfather. At around the same time, Jencks met Maggie Keswick, a student at the school. The pair went on to work together in designing the extraordinary Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack House and other landscape projects, as well as the first of the Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres following her terminal diagnosis with the disease in 1993.

Dedicated eternally to plurality, complexity and the capacity of architecture to ameliorate lives at both a personal and societal level, the legacy of Charles Jencks will no doubt be as diverse, as rich and as filled with enthusiasm as his life and career.