The lecture's title was "The Revenge of the Book!" but instead of learning about literature, students who attended yesterday's talk by renowned architect Charles Jencks received a crash course in architecture.
Credited with inventing the term "post-modernism," Jencks spoke about his theory of the emerging architectural trend and relegated discourse on books to the back burner.
The meat of Jencks' lecture focused on defending the argument that the world is "at a new paradigm of architecture."
According to Jencks, his new model emerges from former eras such as the Western model centered around creationism and the Modern paradigm characterized as a "mechanistic, machine-like, deterministic machine, understandable through simplistic laws."
By showing slides of modern buildings, Jencks backed his theory with seven different design trends of the new paradigm, including the use of fractals, ecological elements, wave, land and cosmic forms and other abstract symbols.
"We have reached a point where architecture is like surrealism," Jencks said.
The renowned architect, designer, lecturer and author appeared before a full audience dominated by Penn graduate students in College Hall. His bestselling book, now in its seventh edition and translated into 11 languages, is entitled The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism.
Though books were not the main focus of his lecture, Jencks did briefly broach the topic.
"The new paradigm is connected so intimately with the computer mediated by print," Jencks said.
He spoke about contemporary popular architecture texts in which "image and text is integrated in an extraordinary way."
"They are not made to be read, but surfed in," Jencks said.
Some audience members said they enjoyed the presentation despite its variance from the title.
"It was more a discussion of architecture," one Folklore graduate student said. "It was very interesting, but I had to reprogram myself to understand."
Other students though, said they were not as satisfied.
"We came to hear a discussion of the book, and it wasn't," a Penn graduate student commented, "although we did learn the weights of some of the books."
According to Jencks, after the production of the book S,M,L,XL by architect Rem Koolhaas, many other copycat styles followed, "so many that I stopped reading and started weighing" -- and apparently, S,M,L,XL weighs in at a hefty 6.1 pounds.
The Penn Humanities Forum, a center founded in 1999 to address the integration of humanistic scholars with traditional academic researchers, brought Jencks to the University. The forum chooses a topic for exploration annually, and this year's topic is the "Year of the Book."
