Laboratory: An Evaluation of and Upon the Meaning of the Extended Self
Polaroid pictures, an Architectural Association Laboratory membership card, a fortune-cookie message saving ‘A Quarrel with Your Lover, then Smile’. A drawer full of self-portraits, pictures and memories. Another drawer full of keys and other necessities. I feel like I am breaking into the house, looking for the chemist and idealist who hides behind its walls. I am looking for the image that is true to the self and not constructed - the self who once lived and worked in this laboratory - and for an evaluation of the meaning of the extended self. I am looking for DNA that is not identified with the fabric of the house, but essential to the soul of the building and its symbolic system. And I am looking for the architect, who is human and indecisive. I seek a missing piece of the house, the fragment behind a man who dedicated his life to ideas.
Jencks merged ideas of cosmology and Post-Mod-ernism by way of an invisible door that communicated between these seemingly incommensurate ideas. He was looking for a form of selfexpression, a contrac-tionary house that functioned as a family home and could become a museum for the public. He found a unique way through the universe, his ideas hurtling through the cosmos like a comet, landing unexpectedly in Lansdowne Walk. But there is duality and beauty here in the bizarre and ludicrous, the found and the experimental. There are eccentric details and considerate experiments - an eclectic collection manifest as ambitious architecture. The thoughtful construction of the library, the precise displays and layouts throughout the house are Jencks in conversation with himself.
They make me wonder - what is the chemist like when he is not seen by the public?
Jencks referred to his library as a city within a house within a city. In the drawers of its house-like constructions, he carefully curated a collection of arguments and dialogues about and documentations of architecture and Post-Modernism. They house the systems. Articles covered with notes reveal questions about the ideas of others. In a process of self-experimentation, when interviewing himself, he extended his own limits, while carefully narrating the image seen by the public.
The library at the centre of Jencks’ endeavour was the laboratory where ideas were tested, and where the architect, as lab technician, made decisions that framed and produced a provocative, non-conforming construction. I see him as a chemist, thoughtfully researching ingredients. The laboratory, where evaluation is ongoing, at once hides and reveals him, as he probes and nurtures physics and psyche, self and cosmos.