Charles Jencks (American 1939-2019) for Aram Designs Limited
Set of Six 'Dice Tables / Seats', 1985
£2,750
Auction: 29 April 2022 from 10:00 BST
Description
painted wood
Dimensions
each 45cm high, 33.5cm wide (17.75in high, 13.25in wide)
Footnote
Charles Jencks was an American landscape designer, architectural historian and cultural theorist, who published over thirty books and was famous as a theorist of Postmodernism in the 1980s.
The current works were displayed in an exhibition of Symbolic Furniture by Charles Jencks at London’s Aram Designs in 1985, and clearly bears his Anglo-American signature style and the experimental and transitional nature of Post Modern architecture of its times. Jencks’ intention with symbolic furniture was to create works that were still somewhat general, but also capable of specific meaning and function, that might reassert its rightful place and give anonymous space a place and location.
It was the completion of his London house that provided the major opportunity to design the furniture to fit with the programmatic system of the house, and the decoration of the house was basically about the Cosmos with rooms decorated to suggest five seasons (including the Indian Summer) around the Sun Stair and the Moonwell. In particular the dice table-seats were intended to relate to the Spring furniture, and were made to be reversible and flexible in use, with the proportions being the same as the Parthenon triglyphs.