Contextual Counterpoint

Author: Charles Jencks
Year: 2024 (Architectural Design; orig. by John Wiley)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/jencks-2024-contextual-counterpoint.md

Summary

Jencks reclaims architectural "contextualism" from conservationist co-option, where it has become "a tool for enforcing urban conformity." Against the reading of contextualism as mere "being in keeping," he argues postmodern practice developed it into a dynamic, potentially transformative design strategy — "contextual counterpoint," a "hybrid trope borrowed from literature and music to illuminate a moral form of urbanism." He identifies four contextual treatments that ensure continuity while transforming the neighbourhood.

Key Claims

• Contextualism reclaimed: conservationists and planners "co-opted contextualism, reducing it to a tool for enforcing urban conformity"; instead "Post-Modernists care about the neighbourhood coherence and urban fabric but seek to extend them with transforming continuity, like musical variations on a theme."
• Four strategies (formal tropes):
  • Punctuated jazz — Stirling's collage composition at the Neue Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), mixing historical and modern themes, "punctuated by counterpointing incidents in highly coloured High Tech" that signal functionally important points (the taxi drop-off, entrances).
  • The variable chameleon — Venturi's National Gallery Extension and others, taking on adjacent codes to "mediate them as it undulates around a large city block," transforming each imitation.
  • The repaired and paraphrased Time City — war-damaged or heritage buildings repaired and paraphrased in new materials (Glyptothek; Chipperfield's Neues Museum Berlin), "an art of urban time."
  • Contrapuntal counterpoint — François's Hôtel Fouquet, Paris: "a sensual amalgam" of regulated Haussmann taste and playful variation; "counterpoint is contrapuntal, the patisserie Mozartian."
• A moral urbanism: the four approaches "illuminate a moral form of urbanism" — preserving continuity of the urban fabric while resisting the "idée reçue" of conformity.

Connections

Concepts: Contextual Counterpoint · Iconic Architecture · Everyday Architecture · Authorship
Authors: Charles Jencks
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006)

Direct Quotes

"[C]onservationists and planners have co-opted contextualism, reducing it to a tool for enforcing urban conformity."

"[P]ost-Modernists care about the neighbourhood coherence and urban fabric but seek to extend them with transforming continuity, like musical variations on a theme."

"'Contextual counterpoint' is thus a hybrid trope borrowed from literature and music to illuminate a moral form of urbanism."

Open Questions

• Can "transforming continuity" (Jencks) really resist the spectacular/iconic economy, or does it remain a formal ethical precept unavailable to the forces of the star-architecture market?