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.

A new site-specific commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani responds to the unique context of The Cosmic House and traces the connections between the artist’s thinking and that of Charles Jencks. Shani writes: “This is a dream, a synchronous opportunity to further extend the shared sensibilities and themes that run through the house, Jencks’ vision and thinking, and my own.”

The exhibition in the AA Front Members’ Room features contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Marson Korbi, Mario Carpo and Mark Garcia, Charles L Davis II and Curry J Hackett, Francesca Hughes and Urtzi Grau, MOULD, and Bryony Roberts and Abriannah Aiken, alongside original material from the Charles Jencks Archive. ‘Chronograms of Architecture‘ was initiated and commissioned by the Jencks Foundation in collaboration with e-flux Architecture.

The Jencks Foundation presents Cosmic Housework, a site-specific exhibition by Madelon Vriesendorp playfully responding to the various spaces and key themes of The Cosmic House, on view from 12 September 2023 to 13 September 2024.

1980 in Parallax is an exhibition by Raqs Media Collective that centres around a new film commission, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone – a poetic reflection on perceptions of a particular moment in history while moving through time, past and present, interrogating varied geographies of perceived centres and peripheries.

The Jencks Foundation is thrilled to announce the opening of Marysia Lewandowska’s site-specific sound installation how to pass through a door, at The Cosmic House from 10th October 2022. The new sound installation, with the title borrowed from one of Maggie Keswick Jencks notebooks containing detailed records related to the design programme of The Cosmic House, is the culmination of the artist’s one-year-long sustained engagement with the Jencks’ archives in London and in Portrack, Scotland.

To mark the public opening of The Cosmic House, this inaugural display brings together a selection of materials from Charles Jencks’ archive that outline the history of the building and some of the key influences and collaborations that helped to develop and shape the ideas behind its design.