'Adhocism:The case for improvisation'

The adhoc is first referenced and explored in the blog post "Using existing objects as alternative materials: Readymades, Dissectibility and Adhocism," which disscuses Charles Jencks "Architecture 2000: predictions and methods (1971). "This post specifically references the 2013 re-issue of Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver's Adohocism: The case for improvisation.

A re-issue of the 1972 book, Adohocism: The case for improvisation, centres around the notion of adhocism within architecture and design. A methodology that uses found or at hand materials to solve real-world problems. The re-issue includes new foreword and after word by Jencks and silver respectively updating and reflecting on adhocism over the last forty years - since the books original release - and its enduring relevance.

Firstly adhocism, as defined by Jencks, is action with speed, economy and purpose or utility, and utilises an available system in a new way to solve a problem with a sense of immediacy and effciency.[1] Alternatively, ahocism can utilises existing objects and treat them as ready mades - not altering their construction - but rather refresh or alter them through transposition and juxtaposition. [2] Adhocism and its immediacy destroys the delays created by specialisation, bureaucracy, hierarchical organisation, standardisation and lack of choice. [3] Adhocism, instead, allows the individual to select and direct selected elects of existing impersonal sub-systems to create their own environment. [4] The realisation of immediate need, by combing adhoc parts, the individual creates, sustains and transcends themself - Shifting and moulding their local environment towards the realisation of one that reflects and services them. [5]

Utilising Nasa’s Mars Rover which uses existing geological machinery and adds transposed laser gun, drill and x-ray, Jencks notes that around 90% of adhocist conceptions are comprised of old systems with a few, select aditions. [6] Additionally, Mars rover is exemplary of the aesthetics of adhocist objects for its parts are left exposed and devoid of packing or a body. [7] The ability to see the parts highlights their past and their new combination. Their subsequent legibility and dissectibility are, to Jencks, essential to adhocism. The adhocist thing or object acknowledges of its own hybridised nature, its compilation of fragments and parts.

Reflecting Jencks notes that since the 1970’s Adhocism has remained a small global trend which can be attributed to conservative taste, the idealisation of the perfect, homogenised product, brandibility and idenitifability, aestheticism. [8]

Jencks and Silver's goal to encourage the consumer created hybrid objects. Bricolage or combination of objects sustained by the plethora of existing manufacturing objects, giving way to personalisation and the custom made. [9] A counterpoint to mainstream mass production, mass customisation and a consumer democracy.

[1] - [9] - Jencks, Charles, and Nathan Silver. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation</i>. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: MIT Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhcvj.