Cells of Life by Charles Jencks consists of eight landforms and a connecting causeway which surround four lakes and a flat parterre. The iconic landforms mark the entrance to Jupiter Artland and reference the cellular process of mitosis.

‘Landscape design has one great quality, which it took me some time to appreciate. Of all the arts it is the most cosmic.’ Charles Jencks

Charles Jencks was among the UK’s most influential practitioners and theorists of art and architecture. He was a pioneer of ‘landforming’ as a synthesis of sculpture, garden design and conceptual thought. His large-scale landforms are inspired by prehistoric earthworks and by the most advanced scientific understandings of nature.

Viewed from above, Cells of Life reveals how cells divide and multiply, presenting the cell’s early division into membranes and nuclei in a monumental celebration of the microscopic basis of life. Another example of Jencks’ landforms can also be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art where his design Landform Ueda similarly marks the entrance to the Modern One Gallery.

‘Feeling proceeds thought, emotion comes prior to understanding. But, as with all art, one can feel if there is more going on under the surface, things which only reveal themselves to those who care, those who are pulled forward by greater meaning. The strange attraction of designed landscape is to promise a journey from the senses to the mind. A pleasurable way to think without conscious labour; a way of relating to nature before you know it.’ Charles Jencks

Biography

Charles Jencks (b.1938, Baltimore, USA, d.2019, London, UK) was a writer, critic and designer whose words and works helped define Post-Modernism and frame the architectural discourse of the late twentieth century. Provocative, witty, refined, wide-ranging and controversial, his writing and his lectures spanned cultural history, the cosmos and science. Jencks was a renowned land artist designing landscapes across the world.

His publications included Meaning in Architecture (1969), Modern Movements in Architecture (1972) and The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977). His house designs include the Thematic House (later The Cosmic House, now open to the public) and the Elemental House in Los Angeles (1979–84). His land art projects included the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Dumfriesshire, Scotland; Northumberlandia Landform on a disused mining works, Crawick; and Landforms and Spirals of Time in Parco Portello in Milan. He co-founded the Maggies Cancer Care Centres with his wife, Maggie Keswick.