I recently went on a private tour of one of the most eccentric private houses I have ever seen. Charles Jenks, who, very sadly died in 2019, was an architect and a polymath. He studied English Literature then Architecture at Harvard and his love of symbolism – which he used ostentatiously and without any regret in the few buildings (and, later, landscape creations) he designed – stemmed from his love of literature. Why, he reasoned, could one not use symbols in architecture when they were used with such success in literature?

The Cosmic House in Notting Hill, London is a marvellous one-off shrine to one of the fathers of Post-Modernism. This surprising architectural, and now deeply unfashionable style resulted from the inevitable boredom with the rather serious and self-important modernism that preceded it and briefly gained ascendancy in the 1980s throughout the Western world.  If I were to pigeonhole Charles Jenks, I would say he was one of the greatest “pigeon-holers” that ever existed. His great flowing diagrams of the history of architecture and its various movements mimicked Charles Darwin’s charts of evolution. Using these giant architectural flow charts, he coined, and later championed, the term “Post-Modernism” in architecture.