Cosmogenesis

Definition

Cosmogenesis is the scientific-creation narrative — the universe as a 13.7-billion-year process of "expansion and complexification" rather than an eternal cosmos — that Jencks proposes as the emergent referent of iconic architecture: "Cosmogenesis is becoming our Genesis story, one that roots us in time and cultural space, one that orients a global culture grown weary of past dogma" (p. 209). The argument completes the book's diagnosis: with religions, ideologies, and metanarratives in decline, the iconic building's "absence of strong belief" makes it an enigma — but "scratch any iconic building hard today and it will bleed nature metaphors" (p. 208). The genre's emergent, partly unconscious iconography (Ronchamp's temple-to-nature and alchemical signs, Sydney's exploding flower, Gehry's sun- and weather-worship, Foster's Pantheon domelets and DNA/Fibonacci traces) is thereby given a destination: the cosmic narrative as a full iconography. "If this were to happen it would become a proper subject of iconography, and that is what I have tried to explore in a Scottish landscape called the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. The speculation is that the basic elements of the universe and earth—the quarks, atoms, DNA, Gaia, black holes, galaxies, etc.—and the basic laws and themes, will become the new icons, the reference points for an art and architecture that is not yet fully born" (p. 209).

The wager addressed to commissioners: "if you're going to ask for a landmark that knocks the socks off your audience, why not ask for something more?" (p. 209) — and the disciplinary frame: "Architecture, like the other arts, can refer to anything today… This profligate pluralism will continue, but it seems to me a question that has to be posed by each generation is how we relate to the rest of the world, and the universe, its laws, changing moods, and continuous creation" (p. 209).

Key Thinkers

• Charles Jencks — the concept's architectural author (pp. 204–09): the cosmogenic referent as the answer to "the quandary of our age"; his own built attempts, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation and the Universe Cascade (2001), "showing cosmic evolution over 13.7 billion years as a series of jumps in organization" (p. 211).
• Le Corbusier — the proto-case: Ronchamp as "a cosmic celebration" and "temple to nature," its stained glass bathing the interior in "colored icons celebrating the sun, moon and stars, the clouds, and sand" from the Poème de l'angle droit iconostasis (pp. 204–05); Chandigarh's annual solar festival ("reminding man once every year that he is the son of the sun," p. 48).

Related Concepts

• Enigmatic Signifier — cosmogenesis is the "ultimate referent" the successful enigmatic signifier gestures toward; the cosmogenic icon is the genre's positive program.
• The Open Work — the semiotic form the cosmogenic iconography would fill: decoded "but not according to any script."
• Symbolism — the new icons (quarks, DNA, Gaia) as a would-be replacement for the exhausted religious and historical iconographies.
• Iconic Architecture — the genre whose "deep and irreversible reasons for existing: commercial and spiritual" (p. 195) the cosmogenic program answers.
• Domination of Nature — the counter-tradition the cosmogenic reading of "nature" must be set against.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Iconic Building (Jencks 2005) — the Ronchamp/Chandigarh proto-cosmology (pp. 48, 57–58, 204–06); the "bleed nature metaphors" audit (pp. 205–08); the Big Bang's misnaming and the balance-of-forces "one part in ten to the 59th power" (p. 209); the Garden of Cosmic Speculation and Universe Cascade (pp. 209, 211).
• The Iconic Building Is Here to Stay (Jencks 2006) — the sequel's compression: "Cosmogenesis … will become the ultimate referent" — the "cosmic architecture" program against the one-liner.

Open Questions

• Is cosmogenesis a genuine iconography (a shared referent with dogma-like stability) or a private iconography (Jencks's own alchemical system, as at Ronchamp — "hints that have sparked decoding on an industrial scale")? The book's confidence ("it might sublate the world religions," p. 209) outruns its evidence.
• How does the cosmogenic program relate to the wiki's unnatural nature and domination-of-nature critiques — is Jencks's cosmic referent a re-enchantment that escapes the instrumentality those concepts name, or another version of it?