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Adhocism, expanded and updated edition: The Case for Improvisation
When this book first appeared in 1972, it was part of the spirit that would define a new architecture and design era--a new way of thinking ready to move beyond the purist doctrines and formal models of modernism. Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver's book was a manifesto for a generation that took pleasure in doing things ad hoc, using materials at hand to solve real-world problems. The implications were subversive. Turned-off citizens of the 1970s immediately adopted the book as a DIY guide. The word "adhocism" entered the vocabulary, the concept of adhocism became part of the designer's toolkit, and "Adhocism" became a cult classic. Now "Adhocism" is available again, with new texts by Jencks and Silver reflecting on the past forty years of adhocism and new illustrations demonstrating adhocism's continuing relevance. Adhocism has always been around. (Think Robinson Crusoe, making a raft and then a shelter from the wreck of his ship.) As a design principle, adhocism starts with everyday improvisations: a bottle as a candleholder, a dictionary as a doorstop, a tractor seat on wheels as a dining room chair. But it is also an undeveloped force within the way we approach almost every activity, from play to architecture to city planning to political revolution. Engagingly written, filled with pictures and examples from areas as diverse as auto mechanics and biology, "Adhocism" urges us to pay less attention to the rulebook and more to the real principle of how we actually do things. It declares that problems are not necessarily solved in a genius's "eureka!" moment but by trial and error, adjustment and readjustment.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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167 people want to read
About the author
Charles Jencks
92 books59 followersCharles 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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 20, 2017
I found this book as a struggling industrial design student and it was like a beacon of light in a dark room. Counter to the professionalization and rigid systemization of everyday life the authors present a clear and compelling case for subverting formalism through flexibility within the gestalt/systemic organizational procedures which dictate our movements through space and time.
While clearly a moment on the way towards postmodernism the book holds a particular magic of its own through the references/examples it brings together, and the generally optimistic stance it takes on human adaptation via invention.
While clearly a moment on the way towards postmodernism the book holds a particular magic of its own through the references/examples it brings together, and the generally optimistic stance it takes on human adaptation via invention.
February 24, 2021
Whilst I only read art 1 (about two thirds) of the book, I was highly impressed by the idea of adhocism in relationship to metaphor. When we look at a household corkscrew, we can see it as a functional device for opening a bottle of wine, or, we can see it as a person, a policeman directing traffic, or turn it upside down and see a rocket ship. This ‘seeing x as y’ is the essence of connotative or associative thinking - it’s how we make metaphors and how we see the world metaphorically.
Similarly, when something "new" is created it is rarely wholly-original, but rather, a new way of looking at an old object/problem, or as he writes: inventions are “the surprising and delightful moments when a new idea or invention results from the sudden and successful conjunction of old ones. In short, it focuses on that rare time when creation takes place, just after two or more elements are brought together in a new synthesis, the birth moment, the eureka flash”. Today we might use the example of Dyson and his bag-less vacuum cleaner which simultaneously changed only one aspect of an existing machine and arguably everything about home-cleaning.
Jencks also uses the idea of an ‘evolutionary stages which we could summarise as invention, imitation and immersion. In other words an idea is created, others copy it, and soon it is so mainstream that no one thinks too much of its origin story, eventually destined to become cliche or ignored... until it is re-sued to invent a new object or idea.
Many of the examples Jenck's gives are useful models to explain the way that metaphor works. For example: Archimoldo’s vegetable-face paintings and the gestalt shift that accompanies them; Abbot Suger’s medieval eagle porphyry vase which is a misaproriation of an ancient antiquity for his religious benefit; the Hotel Fouquet by Edouard Francois, Charles Scarfe’s 1971 Chairman Mao (a man in a chair sculpture) and the residence at Blois, in the Loire Valley, where “through a series of happy accidents over several hundred years” Gothic, Renaissance, Classical and Baroque styles are “smashed into each other around a unifying courtyard.” In the case of the last example, Jencks notes of this “sequential juxtaposition of styles” that “ far from disturbing us, it gives a striking image of each epoch's identity.”
Perhaps the most important example is Niemeyer’s Palace Complex at Brasilia which was designed around the Corbusian doctrine of using single colours, no decoration, and pure, primary shapes. The two congress halls “were built as semispherical dishes resting on a flat plane of Euclidean splendour” with the hope that they would be universally received as a symbol of “harmonious balance” in every Brazilian in the same was as they were 'read' that way by Europeans familiar with the 'International' Style. According to the modernists, symbols, especially Platonic ones, meant the same thing to everyone; they expressed a “universal truth" which in this instance, was that "the sphere which is equidistant at every point from its center, [is] the symbol of perfect harmony cut in half and shared by each congress.” Instead, Jencks says, the Brazilians saw the building as a waste of money and interpreted the two hemispheres as “gigantic salad bowls” metaphorically full of the people’s money, squandered by greedy politicians. Instead of ‘pure’ symbols they became ‘political’ ones, or as Jencks says “the purely local and conventional meanings of the society took priority over the universal and natural ones.”
All of these examples, like any vivid metaphor, are a 'successful conjunction' creating a new 'striking image' - perhaps not the one intended, but memorable nonetheless.
Overall, a very interesting read.
Similarly, when something "new" is created it is rarely wholly-original, but rather, a new way of looking at an old object/problem, or as he writes: inventions are “the surprising and delightful moments when a new idea or invention results from the sudden and successful conjunction of old ones. In short, it focuses on that rare time when creation takes place, just after two or more elements are brought together in a new synthesis, the birth moment, the eureka flash”. Today we might use the example of Dyson and his bag-less vacuum cleaner which simultaneously changed only one aspect of an existing machine and arguably everything about home-cleaning.
Jencks also uses the idea of an ‘evolutionary stages which we could summarise as invention, imitation and immersion. In other words an idea is created, others copy it, and soon it is so mainstream that no one thinks too much of its origin story, eventually destined to become cliche or ignored... until it is re-sued to invent a new object or idea.
Many of the examples Jenck's gives are useful models to explain the way that metaphor works. For example: Archimoldo’s vegetable-face paintings and the gestalt shift that accompanies them; Abbot Suger’s medieval eagle porphyry vase which is a misaproriation of an ancient antiquity for his religious benefit; the Hotel Fouquet by Edouard Francois, Charles Scarfe’s 1971 Chairman Mao (a man in a chair sculpture) and the residence at Blois, in the Loire Valley, where “through a series of happy accidents over several hundred years” Gothic, Renaissance, Classical and Baroque styles are “smashed into each other around a unifying courtyard.” In the case of the last example, Jencks notes of this “sequential juxtaposition of styles” that “ far from disturbing us, it gives a striking image of each epoch's identity.”
Perhaps the most important example is Niemeyer’s Palace Complex at Brasilia which was designed around the Corbusian doctrine of using single colours, no decoration, and pure, primary shapes. The two congress halls “were built as semispherical dishes resting on a flat plane of Euclidean splendour” with the hope that they would be universally received as a symbol of “harmonious balance” in every Brazilian in the same was as they were 'read' that way by Europeans familiar with the 'International' Style. According to the modernists, symbols, especially Platonic ones, meant the same thing to everyone; they expressed a “universal truth" which in this instance, was that "the sphere which is equidistant at every point from its center, [is] the symbol of perfect harmony cut in half and shared by each congress.” Instead, Jencks says, the Brazilians saw the building as a waste of money and interpreted the two hemispheres as “gigantic salad bowls” metaphorically full of the people’s money, squandered by greedy politicians. Instead of ‘pure’ symbols they became ‘political’ ones, or as Jencks says “the purely local and conventional meanings of the society took priority over the universal and natural ones.”
All of these examples, like any vivid metaphor, are a 'successful conjunction' creating a new 'striking image' - perhaps not the one intended, but memorable nonetheless.
Overall, a very interesting read.
September 19, 2024
Still relevant... as if they knew all along that what they were defining was human nature
November 19, 2013
Absolutely fascinating commentary on the way we live and create - necessity is the mother of invention
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews