language of high modernism).
The
Book
Adhocism — The Case
for Improvisation
(expanded and updated)
By Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver
Published by MIT Press, £17.95
Review by Thomas Wensing
Adhocism – The Case for
Improvisation by Charles Jencks and
Nathan Silver was first published in
1972 and, according to its front flap,
‘was part of a spirit that would define
a new architecture and design era’.
In the context of Jencks’s later
books, such as the The Language of
Post-Modern Architecture (1984) and,
more recently, The Story of Post-
Modernism (2011), I suspect that the
reissue is an attempt to retroactively
position Adhocism as one of the books
which was important in formulating
the post-modern critique of the
modern movement.
Undeniably, a mood change did
take place in the Sixties and Seventies,
and a good barometer for what was
happening is a brief look at some
books published at the time. The
Sixties opened with Banham’s Theory
and Design in the First Machine Age
(1960), a book which still fully
underwrites the so-called
universalising fable of the modern
movement. It is worth remembering
that Jencks studied for his PhD with
Reyner Banham at UCL in the late
Sixties and it would not surprise me
if he wrote Adhocism to set himself
apart from his teacher and his positive
attitude on the use of the latest
technology in modern architecture.
The cracks in the myth of
modernism began to show, naturally
with Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life
of Great American Cities (1961), (which
is an impassioned plea against
centralist planning bureaucracies and
for community advocacy), and with
Robert Venturi’s Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture (1966),
(which attacks the purist formal
1 realities of governing and achieving a
Sixties end with the first expressions
of the budding environmental
movement in architecture, for instance
in the Whole Earth Catalog of 1968; an
impressive compendium with
everything one needs to go native and
off-the-grid.
The book Adhocism is clearly
indebted to these, and its main aim
appears to be the positioning of the
do-it-yourself culture of the Sixties as
an empowering, even revolutionary,
choice against the anonymity of
consumerism, mass-productionand
bureaucratic planning methods.
The term adhocism, as explained
in the foreword by Jencks, is a
conjunction of ad hoc, meaning
‘for this particular purpose’ and -ism,
shorthand for a movement. In
architecture it purportedly means
‘design, essentially a collage, where
every part of a building, or each
element of a building complex,
is designed with scant regard to
the whole, and often involves
disparate parts taken from
catalogues’, (architecture professor
James Stevens Curl).
The authors try to give
adhocism the weight of
architectural theory,
which is contradicting the
essence and fluid nature
of experimentation
Straightforward as these Silver. The current edition is expanded improvisation and making can be
explanations may sound, the book with an introduction and afterword by liberating, especially when set against
itself has great difficulty getting its both. Interestingly enough, the new systems of bureaucratic and
point across and is episodic. Firstly, parts are as much a collage as the technological control.
it cannot be expected for a book original, and the subjects are as diverse Ad-hoc solutions, serendipity and
which attempts to capture the as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch spontaneity are cornerstones of the
zeitgeist of the time to remain relevant and Hot Rod sub culture. To give equal creative process, no doubt, but they
in its entirety for some four decades, weight to high art and Pop is a clear are the opposite of premeditation.
and secondly the term ad hoc is dialectical choice, but that does not In suggesting that adhocism is an
applied to so many disparate subjects mean that it is convincing. attitude or a movement, Jencks and
that the book reads as an agonising In summary, Adhocism — Silver try to give adhocism the weight
struggle to justify itself. The original especially according to Jencks — of architectural theory, which is of
edition consisted of two parts, six is an argument against singularity and course contradicting the essence
chapters written by Jencks and four by universality, and in favour of individual and fluid nature of experimentation
choice and pluralism. There is a clear and spontaneity.
1 – A diagram of Consumer Democracy, from
link to the maker culture of today This inherent contradiction was
the newly updated and expanded Adhocism when he argues that a culture of already noted by Rowe and Koetter
when they dismissively coined it under
the chapter heading the ‘Politics of
Bricolage’ in their Collage City (1978).
While Rowe and Koetter acknowledge
that adhocism, and similar notions of
the Sixties such as advocacy planning,
have done much ‘to break down an
unmanageable monolith’, they point
out that the promises of freedom and
democracy, as implied in adhocism,
do not translate well to the day-to-day
balance between conflicting interests.
When Jencks embraces the
spontaneous self-organisation
of the Arab Spring in Egypt and
other countries he indeed poses the
question ‘how to turn such a fledgling
pluralism into a workable federation’,
but you will look in vain in this book
for an answer.
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