A THOROUGHLY POST-MODERN THINKER

Among the most popular modernist quotes is Mies van der Rohe’s maxim, “Less is more,” to which post-modern architect Robert Venturi riposted, “Less is a bore.” To this, Charles Jencks, architectural popularizer and provocateur , who coined the word post-modern in design circles, has continued to add more and more.

“When you design a building, you’re designing it to live a good life--to personify and symbolize the good life,” he says one day at his Rustic Canyon home, where he is demonstrating the good-life principle--variously lounging by the swimming pool, eating poached salmon on the veranda and offering his visitor a postprandial Jacuzzi.

All of this is symbolic, of course. An architectural historian and ardent symbolist, Jencks believes that buildings should communicate to their users through visual metaphors and semantics. Dubbed “The Elemental House,” his Rustic Canyon habitat incorporates signs of earth, air, fire and water--roughly celebrating the outdoor California life. The family’s recently completed London home, “The Thematic House,” is designed around signs of the cosmos and seasons. Both houses are featured in Jencks’ latest book, “Towards a Symbolic Architecture: The Thematic House,” published in November (Rizzoli International: $50).

Yet Jencks’ posture as indigenously laid-back lord of the manor is largely problematic. Opinionated and prolific, Jencks, 46, spends his time teaching, writing and speaking for the post-modern cause. Raised in Connecticut, he is married to Englishwoman Maggie Keswick of the China trading fortune of Jardine-Matheson, and spends nine months a year in London with Keswick and his two children.

In Los Angeles for three months a year, he teaches a class in architecture at UCLA. He’s also been working on his upcoming book on post-modern classicism.

“He never relaxes,” says Keswick. “He gets bored with the blah-blah-blah of everyday life.”

A tall, cerebral man with an urbane manner and sardonic wit, Jencks seems charged with purpose: He marches along garden paths and carries a collection of lists in his jacket pocket. He reaches for them when asked about a good California wine, a Chinese restaurant or a telephone number. He also has an irrepressible habit of questioning his interviewer. “I like to provoke people,” he says.

He can’t remember a vacation when he didn’t take his typewriter along, and he begins his days, not with a Byronic amble over the grounds, but with a medley of sit-ups, press-ups and jumping jacks.

In the role of host and house guide, he proves himself an alacritous showman. He squeezes a glass of juice from blood oranges, which he discovered in Venice in Carpaccio and Bellini cocktails; then he’s off to the four Elemental pavilions, the pool in the shape of the state of California and Keswick’s gardens, themed on Milton’s poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.”

He reads an inscription from Milton on the carport pediment, citing Stygian caves (the garbage cans) and horrid shapes (the cars). He shakes a bush, making a Zephyr-like sound and moves his visitor around, not unlike a symbol herself, to achieve advantageous viewing points. The precise spot to appreciate the sculpture of Aqua, which has been suspended above the Jacuzzi, is atop a ladder on the opposite side of the swimming pool, he says, his tongue not so much as flicking into his cheek. Yes, he does take his symbols seriously, he states.

“In designing this house, I wanted to see what would happen if you pushed this idea as far as you can do it,” he says. “It’s an attempt to see where it breaks down.”

In some instances, symbols push the occupants around. A careless lap-swimmer might crack his head on the inward jut of California. (“You swim on the diagonal,” Jencks instructs.) And some symbols have not worked. The high diving board, designed as the tongue of the Aer Pavilion’s anthropomorphic face, was omitted when building codes stipulated that the shallow swimming area had to face houseward. (A diver would have improbably approached the plunge by climbing up through Jencks’ second-floor studio.)

In the crucial question of symmetry, however, Jencks has bent convention to his will, putting two doorknobs on entrances (one of them functionless) and even two breast pockets on his custom-made Hong Kong suits, a modish touch that his mother-in-law, Lady Keswick, admittedly finds lacking in sartorial elegance.

Indeed, Jencks is a thoroughly post-modern man. He’s reading Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” “engineered as a piece of post-modern literature,” quotes post-modern philosopher Roland Barthes, holds forth on post-feminism and post-modern politics (Marcos’ unseating is “a classic example”) and works in a post-modernized Breuer chair, which he fattened up from what he calls the “wimpish” original.

In his airy studio, he pulls out a copy of his book, its dust cover featuring his reconstructed London townhouse with tall chimneys and lighted windows, and begins a game of guess what’s the symbol. “It’s a rabbit,” he finally says of his townhouse. “You’re supposed to be able to feel it.”

He has also designed furniture--a bedside lamp stand in the form of a lighthouse and chairs shaped like a church and a coliseum.

Jencks admits that his work overintellectualizes architectural significance, and Keswick, who sees their home as “simple and pretty,” has at times put a proprietary foot in symbolism’s path. “There’s a kind of, let’s say, happy tension between us,” Jencks says. “In London, for instance, she said, ‘Symbolism stops at my (library) door, please.’ ” (Jencks irresistibly responded by designing a symbolic book and an M for Maggie on the entrance.)

Yet despite his ardor, he states, “I refuse to think of myself as an oddity.” Architectural symbolism was the rule, he points out, in Ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Modernists, with their 20th-Century minimalist towers, are the abnormality. “Modernism is an aberration of Western culture and the humanist tradition,” says Jencks, warming to the topic on which he heaps many evils.

By stressing architecture’s technical, functional and economic meanings in an internationally uniform style, says Jencks, modernists variously disdained beauty, suppressed architectural rapport with culture and place, ignored art, treated interior decoration like “something moronic women do when they’re bored with their husbands” and imposed their aesthetics on clients, creating the metaphor of the architect as doctor curing society of its bad taste.

Jencks decries the “megabuilding” of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill, the “fast-food architecture” of Wilshire Boulevard and the Van der Rohe-inspired “dumb glass boxes” that have cropped up over the world. He terms I.M. Pei’s controversial pyramid designed for Paris’ Louvre Museum “a cultural murder” and “a typically modernist thing to do.”

Pei’s opposition to Michael Graves’ post-modern addition to New York’s Whitney Museum, he says, gesticulating hotly, is “most egregious. It’s outrageous, frankly. I’m on my high horse now,” he announces with pleasure.

Although modernism was attacked by Venturi and critic Jane Jacobs in the ‘60s, it was Jencks who gave the movement its name in his 1977 book, “The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.” “I said at the time that modernism will refuse to disappear, not because it hasn’t sustained lethal attacks, but because there is no substitute for it,” he says.

Jencks took the term post-modern from historian Arnold Toynbee, who coined it in the ‘50s to describe the successor of the modern world. “Toynbee saw the modern world as having a Renaissance basis and the post-modern world as the beginning of socialism and the end of individualism, Christianity and the decline of the West. It was the beginning of non-Western cultures and of pluralism.”

Pluralism in the use of architectural traditions has produced such diverse interpretations as Michale Graves’ landmark Portland Building and Philip Johnson/John Burgee’s AT&T; Building in New York.

Jencks, however, now stresses the dominant post-modern classical style--the subject of his upcoming book, in which he may codify rules of post-modernism. “I’ll be crucified,” he says gleefully.

Jencks sees post-modernism’s duration till the 21st Century. And after that? “A typical modernist question,” he declares. “That’s the question that advanced industrial civilization asks itself every morning as it does its calisthenics. Post-modernism is the child of modernism; it has the same historicist anxiety; it’s part of this notion that we live in an ever-changing newness.”

The newness, after baroque, will predictably be a new sobriety. “It will look early Renaissance,” says Jencks, “very severe like Brunelleschi.”

But, he states, “Post-modernism has brought back Western humanism and it’s not going to go away. We will not relive modernist machine idolatry.”

Meanwhile, architecture, in the Jencksian view, will continue to be “fundamentally about what you believe in and about the good life as seen by the inhabitants.” That is, about having a dream house. In Rustic Canyon, that means alfresco Sunday lunches for friends, the smell of jasmine and eucalyptus, the sensations of light and space.

In a rare moment of revealing himself as creature rather than creator of Utopia, Jencks exults, “When I come here from London, I think I’m back in paradise. California is really where people were meant to live.”