Les 12: care
Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a
signi cant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of the
most important intellectual and political developments in the late
twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the
embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and
emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the
one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace
is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and
an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we
think about space and such related concepts as place, location,
landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory,
and geography.
The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has
been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to
be bicameral, or con ned to two approaches. Spatiality is either
seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and
explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social
signi cance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach,
one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends
beyond them to new and di erent modes of spatial thinking.
Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a
spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as
simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a
trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new
forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-
modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the
postcolonial critique and the new cultural politics of di erence and identity; in Michel Foucault's
heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the
Citadel of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of
Amsterdam.
Margaret Keswick Jencks (10 October 1941 – 8 July
1995)[1] was a Scottish writer, artist and garden
designer who co-founded Maggie's Centres with her
husband Charles Jencks.
Margaret Keswick was born at Cowhill Tower near
Holywood in the county of Dumfriesshire in Scotland[2]
the only child of Sir John Keswick and Clare Elwes.[1]
Maggie's father was taipan of Jardine Matheson, the
in uential Scottish–Chinese trading company. The
family spent time in Hong Kong and Shanghai as well
as the UK.[3] Keswick was educated in England and read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
After working in fashion, she studied at the Architectural Association in London.
One of Maggie Jencks's main interests was in garden design.[4] In 1978 she published The
Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture. She collaborated with her husband on the design
of the gardens at Portrack, their family home near Dumfries, Scotland, and on extensive
alterations to the house's interior. Another major collaboration was couple's famous house in
Notting Hill, London - open to the public from 2021 as the Cosmic House - designed with the
architect Terry Farrell. Her other garden designs included one inspired by the pastoral poems of
John Milton for the Jencks' house in California; a collaboration with the American architect Frank
Gehry on the Lewis House at Cleveland, Ohio, where bre-optics and running water created a
highly original landscape; and a garden for the lm director Roger Corman.
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, Charles Jencks was the person who set up the Maggie foundation. And he is the historical gure
behind postmodernism.
Charles Alexander Jencks (21 June 1939 – 13 October 2019)[1] was an American cultural
theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie's Cancer Care
Centres. He published over thirty books and became famous in the 1980s as a theorist of
Postmodernism.[2] Jencks devoted time to landform architecture, especially in Scotland.[2] These
landscapes include the Garden of Cosmic Speculation and earthworks at Jupiter Artland outside
Edinburgh. His continuing project Crawick Multiverse, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch,
opened in 2015 near Sanquhar.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 21, 1939, Charles Alexander Jencks was the son of
composer Gardner Platt Jencks and Ruth DeWitt Pearl. Jencks attended Brooks School in North
Andover, Massachusetts, and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature at Harvard
University in 1961 and a Master of Arts degree in architecture from the Harvard Graduate School
of Design in 1965. In 1965 Jencks moved to the United Kingdom where he had houses in
Scotland and London. In 1970, Jencks received a PhD in architectural history, studying under the
noted historian Reyner Banham at University College, London. This thesis was the source for his
Modern Movements in Architecture (1973) which used semiotics and other literary critical
methods to study twentieth century architecture.
Jencks married Pamela Balding in 1961, and had ended July, 1973. They had two sons: one
works as a landscape architect in Shanghai, while the other works for Jardines in Vietnam. He
married secondly to Maggie Keswick Jencks, daughter of Sir John Keswick and Clare Elwes, by
whom he had two children: John Keswick Jencks, a London-based lmmaker, married to Amy
Agnew, and Lily Clare Jencks, who wed Roger Keeling in 2014.[3] Jencks wed Louisa Lane Fox as
his third wife in 2006, and was thus the stepfather of her son Henry Lane Fox and daughter
Martha Lane Fox.[4]
Jencks' rst architectural design was a studio in the woods, a cheap mass-produced garage
structure of $5,000 – titled The Garagia Rotunda, where he spent part of the summers with his
family. The ad hoc use of readymade materials was championed in his polemical text with Nathan
Silver Adhocism – the Case for Improvisation in 1971 and 2013. Jencks' architectural designs
experimented with ideas from complexity theory.
Jencks designed his own London house in tandem with Maggie Keswick and Postmodern
architects including Terry Farrell and Michael Graves.[5] He named this home "Thematic House".
After his second wife Maggie Keswick Jencks died in 1995, Jencks helped co-found and
Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres. Based on the notion of self-help and the fact that cancer
patients are often involved in a long, drawn-out struggle, the centres provide social and
psychological help in an attractive setting next to large hospitals. Their architecture, landscape,
and art are designed to support both patients and caregivers and to give dignity to those who, in
the past, often hid their disease. Maggie Keswick Jencks is the author of the book The Chinese
Garden, on which her husband also worked.
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