This revised text discusses the basic ideas of complexity and chaos theories and presents many examples of architecture based on these ideas in the work of leading architects - Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Charles Correa and Itsuko Hasegawa - along with ecological and organic designs. Charles Jenck's own recent work is used to illustrate concepts in physics and an architecture based on waves and twists. This work both advocates and criticizes as it seeks to define a new direction for the contemporary arts.
Charles Alexander Jencks (born 21 June 1939) is an American architecture theorist and critic, landscape architect and designer. His books on the history and criticism of modernism and postmodernism are widely read in architectural circles. He studied under the influential architectural historians Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham. Jencks now lives in Scotland where he designs landscape sculpture.