Chronograms of Architecture takes its starting point from Charles Jencks’ iconic Evolutionary Tree diagrams tracing architecture and society’s pulsations between different ideals through time. Beyond visualising and classifying architectural styles and traditions, Jencks’ ever-evolving diagrams provided a visual tool to analyse, understand, and represent dynamic relations between architecture and society as they unfold.
An exhibition in the AA Front Members’ Room of six newly commissioned chronograms – diagrams of the history of architecture – drawn in the Jencksian tradition but from a contemporary view, reveal critical and urgent ways of seeing, understanding and working in the architectural culture of the present. These six diagrams – perhaps six streams of a map of now – provoke questions around techno-optimism and techno-bureaucracy, feminist spatial practice and racial disparity, and the ecological implications and productive conditions of architecture.
The symposium begins with a panel discussion between historians, archivists, and designers including Mark Wigley, Lily Jencks, and Ingrid Schroder to reflect on the history of Charles’ diagrams, before bringing together Chronograms of Architecture contributors Pier Vittorio Aureli and Marson Korbi, Mark Garcia, Charles L. Davis II and Curry J. Hackett, Francesca Hughes and Urtzi Grau, MOULD, and Bryony Roberts and Abriannah Aiken, with Nick Axel, Eszter Steierhoffer, and Manijeh Verghese as moderators and AA Tutors as respondents to collectively reflect on the method of diagramming architectural history both as an expressive visual format and as a critical tool of analysis.
Chronograms of Architecture is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House within the context of their research programme ‘isms and ‘wasms that takes inspiration from Charles Jencks’ diagrams. It has been developed into an exhibition and symposium with the Architectural Association.
