Charles Jencks created The Cosmic House not just as a family home, but as a manifesto of post-modern architecture - a movement he was responsible for defining, developing and disseminating. Jencks defined post-modernism in terms of a “double-coded language - one part modern and one part something else.” For the post-modernist, more is more.

In this episode of New Discoveries, produced in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre, our team spent the day at the Cosmic House in West London, decoding its hidden and not so hidden symbolism with researcher, Léa-Catherine Szacka.

Léa-Catherine Szacka’s research explores Jencks’ pivotal publication, ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’ (1977), charting the evolution of Jencks’s ideas in subsequent editions and drawing comparisons to the visual language and communication of the World Wide Web.