Adam Knight: Jencksianagram

2 Oct-20 Dec 2024

Overview

Housed in the Slidescrapers of the Architectural Library, Charles’ slide collection was a versatile image library which he used and reused to illustrate his lectures and publications. As an archive it allows us to see the world and its architecture through Charles’ eyes, while retaining its flexibility as a visual resource which can be reconfigured to present new perspectives and meanings, and new anagrams of Jencks’ archive.

For the past year, artist Adam Knight has methodically viewed every one of the thousands of slides in the Slidescrapers. Drawn to The Cosmic House’s recurring motif of mirrors, Knight identified near-duplicates in the archive and used them to assemble stereograms – a pair of almost identical two-dimensional images displayed side-by-side in a stereoscopic viewer, which the brain perceives as a three-dimensional image. Since these images would have been taken by Charles sequentially, the resulting accidental stereograms potentially allow us to not only perceive an additional third dimension, but also the fourth dimension of time.

The stereograms are experienced through Cosmic Viewers, designed by Knight and inspired by the Jencksiana symbol, itself based on the human face. Each viewer is wrapped in variations of the Architectural Library’s hand-painted wood effects and designated according to the seasons, in line with the calendar theme of The Cosmic House.