Architectural Library at The Cosmic House

The Architectural Library of the Cosmic House, which Charles Jencks used as his study, is a room made up of a ‘village’ of bookcases set beneath a blue curved ceiling, recalling the London skyline at dusk. As Jencks wrote, ‘A village of houses tells us something about its inhabitants, [so] why can’t individual bookshelves convey something about the content of their occupants?’ The bookcases in the Architectural Library were imagined as ‘bookhouses' – designed in the architectural style that would correspond to their respective contents. Architectural history is covered in chronological succession, with the Egyptian/Doric ‘bookhouse' followed by the Early Roman, Late Roman, Early and Late Medieval, Renaissance, Nineteenth Century and so on towards the Post-Modern Skyscrapers. The Modernist ‘bookhouses’ represent the architecture of the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s and the Late Modern period, and are banished to the far corner of the library.