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. These chronograms – diagrams of the history of architecture – were first created in 1969 and focus on the 80 years from 1920 to 2000. 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.
In this spirit, Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House and e-flux Architecture have commissioned six new chronograms to reckon with the present day. These new works interrogate techno-optimism and techno-bureaucracy, feminist spatial practice and disciplinary racism, and the ecological implications and productive conditions of architecture. Some of the new diagrams can be seen to fill in the undulating blanks in Jencks’ diagrams, while others offer an entirely different perspective on architectural discourse. Read alongside one another, they shed light on how we got to where we are now and suggest where architecture might be going.
